Animated Google Korea front page

[bill]

Have you seen the new animated front page [google.co.kr] for Google Korea yet?

I assume that this will appeal to the uber-connected bandwidth fiends in Korea? It looks pretty.

[Woz]

Haha, good find bill, and a perfect example of designing for the culture. Perhaps they have been reading our "mindset" threads. ;)

Onya
Woz

[bill]

As Grendel often says, a lot of what we see now in Korea will eventually filter down to the rest of the world. This may be more of a cosmetic change than a feature though. However, I could see the appeal for this sort of Google front page outside Korea.

[GrendelKhan TSU]

lol bill. actually you beat me to it. Sadly (ironically?), I don't use Google Korea enough to always catch that. LOL. only for comparison or "whats going over there update" reasons. heh.

I still remember begging them to update the dang front page couple yrs back...cause..why NOT? and going through various "points of ugly". lol. Still long way to go, imo. But getting better...at least the fonts are starting to look neater.

still wonder to me and others I ask...is why their fonts looked so bad for so long. uuuugggly. don't know why they refused to CSS them or set different default size or change the default or whatever for so long. Its stuck out like a sore thumb as "not sometime a korean would use". its mostly there now, but its all floating in nowhere still, so doesn't look tight and neat like most sites here (if busy).

Next, deal with the buttons. Then the childish over whelming logo (which ironically is designed by a korean guy-- korean american that is--and they proably will NOT touch as its their corp. identity), THEN do all the cute animation things...but that's just me.

dunno. to me the korean saying "you can paint lines on pumpkin, but that doesn't make it a watermelon" is holding true (ie: need rebuild from top to bottom, not a tweeking of the old base). at one point its nothign ya do its gunna help. take a chance! go back to the drawing board. but again..maybe that's just me (only been beatin my head on this wall for what...5 year now. +_+) heh.

one thing I do know.. gunna be seeing A LOT coming outta G this year... so keep refreshing. :p Guess its time to get on the ball again too. ^^

[edited by: GrendelKhan_TSU at 6:58 am (utc) on May 31, 2007]

[GrendelKhan TSU]

and on that note:

Along with the compliment, he presented evidence of Google's commitment _ a unique user interface for its Korean-language homepage designed to serve the specific tastes of Korean users.

...

``This is the first time that Google has revamped its search page specific to a certain group of users in its history,'' said Ted Cho who heads Google Korea's research center.

article [koreatimes.co.kr]

like I said in threads about Google alliance with Daum...
its not even 2% of the market here. so pop-up icons is still a band-aid on a gaping wound.

still, gunna be fun to see how more band-aids come out before they just gotta amputate the leg and go for a full prostetics. lol. if anything these little stylized enhancements are good indicators of what you may see down thte road Stateside. ;)

[Vimes]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/asia_pacific_search_engines/3370715.htm [webmasterworld.com] by bill - 4:20 pm on June 18, 2007 (jst +9)

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Hi,

How long has Google.co.kr looked like that?

i'm getting all my webamster tools appear underneath the search box.

i like it!

Vimes.

[bill]

That didn't take long to make it to the home page. Nice catch Vimes.

[sun818]

It could be due to extraordinary access to bandwidth - but it could also be Google experimenting with smaller sites before rolling out to higher traffic sites. eBay does the same experimenting with smaller international sites before rolling out to the main USA site.

[LifeinAsia]

A lot has to do with the Korean surfers' mindset: if it doesn't flash, wiggle, explode, play music or a video, or move about the screen, it's boring. Most non-Koreans will get nauseated within 10 seconds of looking at most Korean sites (even if they're not epileptic :) ), yet most Koreans will probably fall asleep within the same period looking at sites that aren't loaded down with Flash and animated .gifs.

By the way, I looked at the link and they've either removed the animation or they're not showing it to IPs outside Korea.

[bill]

It looks like they switched the settings a bit. Depending on whether I'm logged into a Google account or not I see different setups. I was getting the iGoogle page if I was logged in but if I logged out and went to the Korean language page I can see the animated page again.

They may be doing some split testing to see what people prefer on their default page.

I'm in Japan, so they're not limiting access to just Korea.