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.
