Google: Specific cultures and localized market requirements

III – 3 Specific cultures and localized market requirements

Google's home page is available in an incredible number of languages. All of these pages have the same pattern except for only three of them: Japan, South Korea and China.
Google has always been thought for a clean and light interface(no images, no flash animations, HTML simplified version available for low connection bandwidth).
However it does not fit at all with the Asian culture which is(for example) recognizing a quality website to the number of animations on it. A good website for them has firstly to be attractive whereas the Western culture tend to think that a website has to be useful before all and then easy to read.
People think too much and this is a bad habit they took, that Internet made the world flat among cultures and countries, this is not true even on the Internet Culture, countries habits have serious consequences.

Google is available until now available in 104 languages and dialects with a customized home page for 138 countries. In those 138 countries only three of them differ.

www.google.com.ar/

Google Argentina has exactly the same interface as hundreds of others countries Google home pages

http://www.google.co.jp/

As you can see a second block as been added. This block looking very similar to his competitor in this country: “Yahoo Japan”

http://www.google.cn/

Google China looks like his Korean fellow but without the block above. Animations are however still here.

http://www.google.co.kr/

Here for Google Korea two blocks have been added. The most relevant one is the one below. By passing the mouse on one of the color point an animation came out.

It is quite incredible to see and to discover that a service such as Google(only one page)which has to modify his interface in order to fit at best some specific markets.