Google is testing a new homepage design on its Taiwan and Hong Kong sites.  There is order in this chaos, these pages are designed to take advantage of the higher broadband speeds available in those countries and have been optimized thusly.

These pages are of a completely different design available on any of the Google US or European sites and for now, anyway, the new pages stay as the default.

The company announced these new designs at the in may at the Seoul Digital Forum, the new designs forgo a clean interface but instead adds a row of icons above the search bar and a row of animated icons below it, of course, with a Google account all these features can be customized.

Google Taiwan and Google Hong Kong have the same basic design but the Hong Kong version offers content in English.  Of course, those feeling a bit nostalgic can still view the classic page.

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google and the company’s president of technology said in an interview, “We think [the new design] will be more appropriate for the local cultures, and their context, and their broadband connections.”  He added that the new pages were specifically designed with the extraordinarily fast broadband connections available in those countries.  Additionally feedback from users on the new pages has been, according to him, “positive.” 

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 1:38 pm under Google.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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