10 guides
Korean local business data, with the padding removed
Korean businesses and visitor reviews from Naver Place, the directory Koreans actually use: reputation aggregates, menus, and the out-of-area padding Naver adds to its own search results.
Scrape Naver Place
Google Maps coverage in Korea is thin; Naver Place is where the data is. A walkthrough of querying it, and of the padding you have to remove before the results mean anything.
Naver Place API
Naver publishes developer APIs, but not the one people are looking for. What exists, what it covers, and why the public pages are the practical route.
The padding finding
Naver silently pads its search results with businesses from neighbouring areas. Measured across ten queries — and it is the difference between a local dataset and a regional blur.
The 300 ceiling
Every Naver query stops at 300 results regardless of what it claims to have matched. Coverage is a function of how you partition the map, not of how high you set a limit.
Naver Place fields
Measured on 3,295 businesses across 8 verticals and 8 regions — including which fields simply do not exist for clinics, academies and pharmacies.
Virtual phone numbers
Naver puts a relay number in front of many businesses' real lines. Between 37% and 87% of them, depending on vertical, publish only that — and a dataset that does not flag it is a call list into a redirect.
Reviews without identities
Every Naver review carries a nickname, a stable account id and a link to the reviewer's entire history. None of it is returned, and a test fails the build if it ever is.
Naver vs Google Maps
In most countries this is not a question. In Korea it is the whole question, because the platform Koreans use is not the one most tooling targets.
Reputation aggregates
Average rating, a ten-band star distribution, reviewer counts and a theme analysis with counts — all computed by Naver, and all cheaper than deriving them from raw reviews.
Korean search terms
Naver's search is Korean-first. The choice of term decides coverage more than any other input, and the region list decides whether the results are where you think they are.