South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong get a cooler Google

A subtle wake-up call to North American Internet subscribers is now coming from the South Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong-based versions of Google, and their iGoogle start pages. These broadband-rich markets are seeing a more complex version of Google's historically simple start page, with some flashy animations, and a color-coded system of dots to represent various Google services. Is this a sneak peak at the next generation of Google's GUI? Potentially.

We've seen some other flashy interfaces for Google over the years, with some of the more ambitious efforts remaining hidden in its experimental section. The latest public change has been Universal Search, which the company unveiled in mid-May. While this has improved the variety of results you get from searches, it's not nearly on the eye-candy level of the stuff that's coming out of the East.

Here's a video of the new UI, which features the quick-to-load colored dots, which trigger the animation when you mouse over them. Slick.

[via DownloadSquad via PC World]