Abstract
Google has been a dominant search engine in the US and Europe for several years, but it has little market share in South Korea. South Korea's largest portal Naver has been dominant due to its large database of answers from its successful knowledge-sharing service. This research asks when and to what degree an inferior search engine can benefit from introducing an online knowledge-sharing service. We answer this question by modeling the dynamic competition between two heterogeneous search engines: one is an inferior search engine with a knowledge-sharing service and the other is a superior search engine without a knowledge-sharing service. By numerically solving a differential game between these two search engines, we show that the inferior search engine generally benefits from its knowledge-sharing service, and the degree to which the knowledge-sharing service helps the inferior search engine to enlarge its market share increases as indexable online content decreases. Our most important finding is that the inferior search engine is well advised to make its database of answers unavailable to the superior search engine, especially when indexable online content is limited.
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