Naver was created in June 1999 as the first South Korean portal website with a self-developed search engine. In August 2000, Naver began the 'comprehensive search' service, which allows users to get a variety of results from a search query on a single page, organized by type, including blogs, websites, images, cafes, etc. This was five years before Google launched a similar offer with its 'universal search' function.
In the early days of Naver's operation, there were a limited number of webpages available in the Korean language. To fill this void, Naver became an early pioneer in user-generated content through the creation of the 'Knowledge iN' service in 2002. With Knowledge iN, users can pose questions on any subject and select among answers provided by other users, awarding points to the users who give the best answers. Knowledge iN was launched three years before Yahoo! launched its similar 'Yahoo! Answers' service, and now possesses a database of over 200 million answers.
Over the years, Naver has continued to expand its services. It launched its Web comic service 'Webtoon' in 2004 containing cartoons and animated content. From 2005 to 2007, Naver expanded its multimedia search services, including music and video search as well as mobile search.