That said, Google has been very hands off when it comes to operating in Vietnam, leaving the door open for Cốc Cốc to continue gaining ground. As of April 2018, Google’s Chrome browser captured a 60% share of the desktop browser market in Vietnam, versus Cốc Cốc’s 25% market share. But, from a size and user perspective, the company still has a long way to go to match its main and only real competitor, Google. The above features are a large reason why millions of local internet users have chosen Cốc Cốc over the likes of Firefox or Safari, including almost 2 million new monthly active users added in the past year. For example, because Vietnamese are heavy consumers of online videos and local internet speeds are slow, Cốc Cốc has always prioritized increasing download speeds and available options for its users, such as downloading videos as mp3 files within the browser. They not only factor in how Vietnamese users speak and interact with each other, but also their web browsing/searching behaviors. Cốc Cốc's products detect and auto-complete these accents, and include a Vietnamese spell check and a Vietnamese/English dictionary. In Vietnamese, words with the same spelling can have completely different meanings depending on the placement of accents and the emphasis of syllables.
These restrictions were gradually loosened over the next couple of years, but Cốc Cốc continued its massive user growth rate because of an unparalleled hyper-localized feature set.Ĭốc Cốc takes into account Vietnamese linguistic conventions like tones and accents, and its search engine focuses on locally relevant results. At the time, Cốc Cốc was the only browser in communist Vietnam offering a seamless and quick connection to the social networking site. When the site officially launched in 2013, it quickly picked up a loyal user base as it provided something both unique and highly-valued: easy and consistent access to Facebook. From the start, Cốc Cốc was meant to be THE Vietnamese browser and search engine-Lavrenko moved to Vietnam shortly after the company was established and the real work began. This task proved to be difficult, yet helped inform his next venture, this time targeting Vietnam. Leading up to this moment, Lavrenko had spent the better part of 5 years building, an AI-driven Russian search engine providing direct answers rather than website results to user queries. Cốc Cốc’s story began in Moscow, Russia in 2010, where Lavrenko partnered with three Vietnamese programmers studying at Moscow State University. The more I explored the Cốc Cốc browser and search engine and learned from Lavrenko and Melentieva, the more I recognized how intentional and detailed the company has always been in developing and maintaining a truly localized experience.