Google Revamps Japan Site

Google Japan has updated its minimalist home page with more graphics and direct links to some of the company's services.

The move is the latest in a series of updates that has seen its local home pages in several major Asian nations updated to take advantage of fast broadband connections. In May last year it kicked off the update with a renewal of its South Korean site and later in 2007 added extra features to its Taiwan and Hong Kong sites.

The new Japan site has a row of four tabs underneath the search bar each of which displays different icons. The default "recommended" tab has direct links to Gmail, YouTube, Google News, Google Maps and its transport navigator, providing the shortest route between two spots using public transport.

The second tab has links to Google's picture, blog and desktop search services and a dictionary; the third tab links to the Google Calendar, Documents, RSS reader and toolbar, while the final tab has another link to YouTube and connects to Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.

The site was updated to provide quicker links to Google services, said Atsuko Doi, a spokeswoman for Google Japan. She said many users, especially new users, don't know where to find additional Google services and the icons are intended to make that easier.

Japan is one of a handful of markets where Google doesn't dominate the search market. Yahoo Japan has the crown as number one portal in Japan and also leads Google in searches although the latter is starting to catch up with Yahoo thanks in part to the growing popularity of YouTube.

Yahoo sites attracted a combined audience of 43 million Internet users in January versus 33 million for Google sites, according to recent data from comScore.