By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

Google Korea plans a major facelift for its main page in December, displaying media content such as news and entertainment, photos, popular blog entries, alternative searches and other items of interest upfront.

This will be the first time in any country that Google will be ditching its universal format of hiding everything behind a single search box, Google Korea said.

Simplicity has always been Google's biggest strength, but its Korean unit seems ready to compromise this to make its Web page more attractive to Korean users who have grown accustomed to fancy Web sites crowded with features.

Obviously, the company felt the need to try something dramatic. According to Korean Click, an Internet market researcher, Google's Korean page controls just around 2.2 percent of the country's search queries.

Naver (www.naver.com), the country's most popular Web site, has a 66 percent share of the search market, followed by Daum (www.daum.net), which has a 20 percent share, according to the figures. Nate (www.nate.com) is also gaining a larger chunk of the traffic after absorbing the popular Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) social networking services.

Google Korea officials stress that a heavier Google site wouldn't result in a slower user experience. Perhaps, the bigger question is whether the effort to be more like Naver, Daum and Nate is the right option for Google Korea to be more widely used.

``When Web portals add more features and make their main pages more complex, this usually leads to slower loading time. However, the newer version of Google's Korean Web page will be quick and sophisticated at the same time,'' a Google Korea official said.

The new Google Korea's (www.google.co.kr) main page will have the Google logo and search box pulled up from its current central position to make room for the categories of ``blogs,'' ``people'' and ``hot issues.''

Links to Google's subscription-based Web services, such as ``Textcube'' blogs, Gmail e-mail services and Picassa digital photo editing services, will be provided at the bottom of the page.

Changes will also be made in the layout of search results, which will now include categories such as ``related search words,'' ``related topics'' and ``hot topics,'' enabling users to see what's the latest buzz on the Web.

Previously, Google Korea made up for its miniscule presence in the search market by its strength in online advertising services, sharing a duopoly with Yahoo! Korea-backed Overture.

However, Daum's recent decision not to renew its cost per click (CPC) advertising contract with Google Korea and instead defect to Overture deprived the former of its biggest advertising client and punched a 60 billion won (about $52 million) hole in its annual revenue.

CPC is a performance-based model where an advertiser pays a fee for every click on its advertisement. The majority of text advertisements sold by search engines are based on the CPC model.

With uncertainties rising on the advertising side, strengthening its position in the search market has just become more critical for Google Korea to maintain as a manageable business.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr