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Google Losing Ground in China?
TG writes "Yahoo is running an article about a recent study released by a Chinese Internet research group that shows Google losing market share to their Chinese rival, Baidu.com. From the article: 'The survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Internet Network Information Center, reported that Baidu.com Inc. boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google Inc.'s share was at 33 percent, as the American Internet search engine kept its customer base steady while the overall market grew, said the survey, seen Tuesday on CNNIC's Web site.'" Factual analysis or results driven by self interest?
Right after we bought suso.com, I noticed that a bunch of people from China were already going to the suso.com address, even though there was nothing at the URL before. So I figured they meant to go to suso.cn, which seems to be a search site as well. I asked a Chinese friend of mine and she said that Su means fast and so means search or find in Chinese.
It has a few things that Google doesn't have and probably never could have. The first is a multimedia search engine which links directly to online rips of copyrighted materials. Any Joe Chan over in China wanting to download something like the latest Britney Spears album can hop on Baidu and grab any which link they find. Google, being an American company would be hard pressed to do something as outrageous as that which would no doubt incur the wrath of the RIAA and MPAA, not to mention the Boy Scouts of America (just kidding, but BSA too).
The second is that Baidu is in Chinese, by Chinese, and for Chinese. Google may be in Chinese, but it is owned by American company and anyone who has done business in Asia knows, Not Invented Here was invented there. So Baidu has the hometurf advantage.
And finally, Google simply doesn't bring up the sorts of search results that people are generally looking for anymore. Lots of random searchvertisements, links to other lame search engines (with no results!), and contentless blogs are the results you get with Google when searching outside of English. With Baidu, it's still pretty new enough that it isn't overwhelmed with spam.
What's the deal with the story writeup with no links, though?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/08/ap/ ap_083105.asp?trk=top
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Google does have a stake in Baidu.com, and they're also a rumored takeover target for Google. It's only a minority stake, but still, most analysts say that Google is aligning itself financially toward Baidu.com, while Yahoo recently made a large investment in one of Baidu.com's rivals, Alibaba.
Most of the computers we came across in China were indeed using Baidu as their start up page.
Just saying...
Another thing that most people don't think about is that Chinese people are proud of their country. This comes as a strange thought to most people who went through university indoctrination in the West, but Chinese people will prefer a Chinese solution when one is available. Even if it's a poorer alternative than the foreign one (it'll get better if we use it, they think).
And as someone else pointed out, baidu.com has links to "multimedia" (i.e. pirated movies) that google would get sued over. I mean, look at their site, it's got "mp3 search" right on the front page. And check out this site, it's got plenty of entire albums available for your listening pleasure, and it's a legitimate site in China.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
is probably:
Google Losing Ground in China
In Russia, there are a few popular search engines, the most popular being Yandex ("Ya" is the last letter in the Russian alphabet and also a word meaning "I", so it's Index with "Ya" instead of "I"). It has tons of free services, it has paid "ad words" style advertising, and most importantly its spiders are optimized for Russian sites. For Russian language searches it's simply BETTER than Google, believe it or not. If Yandex doesn't find it, Google is used as a last resort.
After using baidu during my summer internship in Shanghai, I discovered Baidu has one clear advantage over Google Chinese language version that has nothing to do with number pages indexed. One of the advantages is that Chinese characters are very complex and require larger font sizes to see clearly, which is why Baidu's search input field uses size 33px font, compared with Google's 20px. These small details make a difference, especially since one needs to check you input often because input is most often based on some form of predictive text entry, matching phonetic alphabet (pinyin) with actual characters. Even if you can touch-type perfectly, you still need to review if the input algorithms have correctly predicted which characters you meant to type and correct homonyms. Maybe now you'll better understand why Chinese people like to use home-developed websites.
"100 times" is what they have printed on their website (disclaimer: I'm reading it by way of Japanese -- yay for borrowing half the language from China -- and that character can mark degrees in Japanese as well as times). They also have an official explanation of where their name comes from which is written in English for the benefit of their investors. Apparently its from a classical Chinese poem about seeing something beautiful one hundred times.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
their about page says "Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.".
As posted by another anonymous poster who was reduced to a 2 (I'm sure this one will too because this site is run by Nazi's)
China allows Google to be used to search but when attempting to click on links or cache's from Google you have problems.
Baidu allows you to click through without any issues, but is mostly censored. So If you're doing a search for COMMUNISM and CHINA, most likely you'll be brought to a nice propaganda site about Communisims superiority over Democracy rather than history untethered and nuetral.
"Google is often censored (Score:2, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05, @12:05AM (#13481079)
Parts or the whole of Google and GMail are often blocked entirely or contents censored when accessed from behind China's Great Firewall. Reasons for this could include a combination of censorship of ideas and favoritism toward Baidu and other local companies.
Baidu also contains features that Google cannot do, like their very convenient MP3 search. This may be a strong reason why they are favored by users. Even users outside of China are realizing this.
"
You're not getting results because you're not spelling it correctly. It's tiananmen, not tianamen.
... and then it's obvious that Baidu is censored. Every page on google describes the event, while in Baidu, it leads to a "no page exist" Wikipedia error page. (Either intentionally or accidentally, there's an unpreventable extra quotation mark appended to end of result in Wikipedia (even if you don't use any quotation marks), preventing you from seeing the site.)
Spelled correctly, Baidu shows 777 results. Google gets 50100.
And after the two wikipedia error pages, you only get very short snippets. Oh, and the third result got through. I think the reason that it slipped through is that someone cleverly named the thread on a bulletin board "stir fried tomatoes with eggs" in Chinese.
Basically, the Wall is packet-based. Cisco made special backbone switches and routers for Chinese government. So, if your traffic is encrypted or zipped(or rared), you are fine.
The chinese government can be "evil", but it's not AFAIK corrupt (in the takes-bribery sense at least). Makes sense, because the penalty to taking a bribe in China is death (there were some five executions last month IIRC).
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048