Google Overhauls Korean Search Engine, Adopting Universal Search

January 30th, 2008 by Julie Kent | 3 Comments

Wednesday morning, Google announced that they had done an overhaul on their Korean-language search engine, adopting universal search for the Korean site. Google is attempting to gain significant ground in South Korea, which just happens to be one of the world’s most wired countries.

Lee Won-jin, director of Google Korea, said that the results-blending concept of universal searc, which has already been implemented in Google.com, has now been implemented in the Korean language version of the popular search engine.

Universal search blends various types of search results, such as your standard website results, as well as videos, images, or even pages of books. It was first implemented at Google in May of 2007, when other top search engines also began employing the method.

The current most popular search engines in South Korea are local offerings, such as NHN Corps’ Naver Web site. Google, according to Lee, hopes to make some head way in Korea:

“The interface change will distinguish us from other search engines in Korea, where growth potential is huge given its broad base of Internet users. We’re not setting any domestic market share target, but we expect the new services will help,” said Lee at a news conference.

If Google can take increasing portions of the South Korean search market, it’ll be good news for the company and investors.

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Comments

3 responses so far ↓

CBR on Jan 30, 2008 at 7:21 pm

Yeah the whole Asian market is going to explode over the next 5 years. I think we often overlook the opportunities that will come from areas such as China, India and countries like Korea.
imBuntu on Jan 31, 2008 at 2:04 am

Google have gained significant ground in India as well since it has adopted universal search for Indian sites.

Google research results are very much supportive to Unicode and UTF8 encoding, and that’s the reason that google are able to display search results of local language pages like india language (i.e. devnagri, hindi, marathi etc.)

Best of luck Korea for adoption of universal search results for korean sites.

Regards
imBuntu
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Filipina Girl on Feb 14, 2008 at 1:46 am

Well, Yahoo has already overtaken Google in Japan. Google can not afford to lose the other markets in Asia