Search Engines Will Go The Way Of The South Koreans

Anyone else see Google’s April Fools yesterday?  (Google is Topeka) Whenever Google does something disconcerting with its layout, I’m struck by the layout itself – the clean white page, the clever renditions of the logo, The Text Box. I like it. I think it’s ingeniously, elegantly simple. According to Dean Donaldson, though, that clean simplicity is precisely why the East hasn’t caught Google fever.

Naver and Daum, South Korea’s Google and Bing, are representative of where America’s headed next. Google emerged in the dial-up age, where connection time was the agitating period in which we made sandwiches. Graphic-rich content that took ages to load wasn’t nearly as important to us as loads of quick data; Google, then, was revolutionary.

South Korea never had sandwich time – they had high-speed broadband from the get-go – so the ingenuity of a simple, powerful text search has always been totally lost on them, as reflected by their search engine design:

“Korea’s search-engine sites are more like portal websites where search results are fully integrated with images, video, music and user Q&A’s, which boasts 50,000 questions a day posted by users to share information with fellow locals. It reminds me of a more sophisticated Yahoo search portal.”

This is actually more humorous than it is a big deal – the Koreans are even more comfortably ensconced in the instant-gratification culture than we are. The next bend is far more exciting: if we follow the South Korean trend, the Text Box may soon be obsolete. In South Korea and Japan, more people use mobile phones to access the web than PCs. And while Google epitomizes the way that we’ve always interacted with the Internet (question-response, input-output, a self-directed series of clicks), phones are capable of something much more…organic. Organic, and somewhat scary.

“Quick Response (QR) codes are appearing on everything from print to outdoor billboards…[enabling] auto-opening of mobile pages by pointing mobile phones at such posters…Applications like Red Laser on an iPhone allow barcode reading of products to automatically search for price comparisons…We are seeing the use of cameras to find information through augmented reality overlaying the natural world with interactive information. And now, RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] will take this even a stage further, when proximity to items can auto-trigger further information…”

That’s pretty cool.

–Trisha Jain