Slashdot Mirror
Search Engines Set To Vie For China
ackthpt writes "Could China be where the battle for top search engine is waged? Reuters is carrying an article on the play for the Chinese search engine market. Already the second largest internet market in the world, there are estimated 80 million users in China and the number growing fast. Yahoo's acquisition 3721.com, Google-styled Baidu.com and Zhongsou.com are already poised and profitable. Where is Google? Blocked at one time, Google has made its way into China. Their handy cached pages are not available, but they do offer the Ad Words service in chinese to lure business. Those unfamiliar with China's rapid adoption of the internet might like to read up on the success of DangDang.Com an online bookseller, on the BBC, where it's noted that houses without heat or running water may actually have internet access. Thanks to China coming in where many growing pains, suffered by the west, have already passed or obstacles such as competing vested interests aren't as influential, so internet infrastructure is going in at a rapid pace."
On the chinese google page, what are the three radio buttons for? I know my google doesn't have them.
China is the main developing technology market now... your main competition problems in the US,EUR, etc. are that you will be dominated by market sway and sentiment in an existing user base. The choice between Yahoo and Google in china may well be like the choice 'VI or Emacs' that some people here went through years ago...
the popularity of the Internet in China. My in-laws are Chinese, living in Beijing. A coupla years ago, my brother-in-law got a cheap computer and a dial-up connection. Now he's just as much a net addict as the average western user. He uses email constantly, P2P networks, chat, online purchases... you name it. He just an average kinda guy too, not a techie.
It would be foolish for any large (maybe even some small) business to ignore the Chinese market. Give'm too much of a head start and they'll have their own market locked up tight internally.
--
I'm robSlimo, the username is a product of frustration after losing the pwd to RatOmeter.
I think India has a larger poulation now actually
Baidu.com has an mp3 tab..
run a search for "metallica" or whatever..
kind of useful.. glad these guys can get away with that where mp3.lycos.com had to shut down.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
China has two modes: hypermodern and very obsolete. A big Chinese city is like a veneer of chrome and neon put on an old tile-roofed hovel- you walk down the main streets, and the buildings are new and the shops stylish. You take a turn and it's rows upon rows of little houses with carts of vegetables out front and pirated DVD stores in between. An "Internet Cafe" in America is a swanky establishment- modern PCs, business class high speed Internet connection, and lattes to sip. In China, it could be just as sophisticated, downtown. Or, it could be 5 clunker boxes sharing a 56k modem in a random little room on a back street.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Microsoft are always in there somewhere - if you look on the 3721 site it says that they have close links with MSN
"...notably our collaboration with MSN enhances the users' search and navigation experience on the IE browser in China..."
What is the leading browser over there - if they were all using IE then you'd say that Yahoo have the advantage here but since they have a tendancy to prefer their own Linux distro's I guess it's all up in the air?
The real technical hurdle search engines will have to face lie in India, not China.
Chinese Dialects -
http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/dialectmap.htm
Indian languages -
http://www.sanyal.com/india/indlang.html
With a handful of dialects & Mandarin being the mainstream language, a Chinese search engine will have a comparitively smaller problem sifting through the problem space than an Indian search engine that would have to deal with content in 325 distinct languages ( not dialects...India has 1000s of dialects! ) with atleast 100+ different scripts.
Ofcourse, IT tends to penetrate the English speaking population first & foremost, so most search engines, as a first cut, focus on content written in English & ignore the rest.
.. which company wants to find itself in trouble when it search engine catalogues pages with anti-government sentiment. Because, even if there's major censoring going on, some will still get caught by whatever webcrawler they end up using.
I would be interested in knowing to which point the Chinese government limits and will limit the access to information on the Internet, as after all it could be very easy to find documents discussing the way the Chinese government works, and which the Chinese leadership could find "a negative influence" over the population. After all, we in Europe, on a country-per-country base alone, have some problems blocking sensitive content which is uploaded and exchanged on the Internet - but then as soon as the governments try to enforce these limits a little bit, there's an outcry denouncing "an attack against free speach" (but the use of this "free speach" can be a little scary, when it is to detail the construction of home-made bombs); then again this may not be such a problem in China.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
I think there should be a great deal of concern of new search engines in China. The major customer in China is the state and a number of companies including Cisco, Yahoo, and Microsoft have been catering their software to permit Chinese censorship. The Chinese government has also been active in removing certain keywords from use in popular search engines, like google.
If I type in 'Falun Gong' or 'VIP Reference' (page 30-31)' in any of these new search engines, I recieve no content. Sure these my offer new commerical opportunities, like MP3 searching. Both they are part of state control in China. Companies back in 2000 had to agree to self-censorship. These new sites represent a growing trend of corporate complicity in Chinese censorship. And if common search engines are actively controlling what is 'found' on the Internet, there is great concern that average citizens will become acostumed to a regulated Internet.
fenn