Slashdot Mirror
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?
At least there's one country where Ballmer doesn't have to fucking kill Google and Larry Page.
190 to go...
Google hired that guy away from MS with the intention of shoring up their presence in PROC. It's quite obvious that they were willing to deal with the risk for *something*.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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.
Looking for information on a subject? Just Bi>Baidu it!
Nope..not the same at all...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
a 2.6 percent stake in Baidu... Is Google hedging its bets to some extent?
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
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!
From what I could tell it looked like the Baidu search was tailored for music copyright violation. Google couldn't get away with that being a US company, but Baidu seems to have no qualms giving the finger to the RIAA.
For a minute there I thought we were going to go a WHOLE FUCKING DAY without a story about Google. Thank God for ScuttleMonkey's heroic efforts! He made it in with just 38 minutes to go! Nicely done!
Although I must admit I am more than slightly disturbed that there was a two day period wherein not a single story about Google was posted. Surely the parties involved have been disciplined accordingly.
is probably:
Google Losing Ground in China
Can someone who knows better Chinese than me tell me what Baidu means? "Bai" sounds like "one hundred" and "du" sounds like "degree". 100 degrees makes no sense but it does sound a lot like the meaning of Googol (or Google) in Chinese. I could be way off on this one since Mandarin is not my native dialect and it's been a while since I've studied it.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
TG should've written "The Associated Press has an article about a recent study (English PDF) 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? Or just another interesting article posted to Slashdot with editorial opinions but no editorial checking?
The report itself has a pie chart with the following breakdown: Baidu 51.5%, Google 32.9%, Sohu 4.6%, Sino 4.0%, Yahoo 3.7%, and 3.3% other in Beijing; 43.9% Baidu vs. 38.2% in Shanghai; and 48.0% Baidu vs. 28.7% Google in Guangzhou.
However, the next page breaks down searches by category, and Baidu is only in the lead (55% vs. 15% Google) in downloadable music. In all other categories, Google is in the lead. Indeed, 60% of users who use Google primary and Baidu secondary say that the reason is Baidu's music search.
This confirms that Google is a better (more popular at least) search engine, of course, but Baidu is either better at searching Chinese music or, as another poster said, Baidu can link to MP3s without the RIAA being able to do anything about it.
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.
How the hell does that company have any market share at all? It's in some crazy foreign language or something.
It doesn't even know where Slashdot is!
I can't find slashdot anywhere in the first few pages, but Google shows up a lot.
Simon's Rock College
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,
China has new copyright laws and has acted as if they are going to enforce them. Don't expect this sort of feature to last for long on Baidu. The link is to a Chinese article, so it could be filled with propaganda, but they are acting this way to favor western companies. If the AA's make enough noise, Baidu will fall in line too.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
The headline is kind of misleading. Only tells half the story, anyway.
If you look at the original report, though Baidu has a greater overall market share (maybe because of the pirated mp3 search someone mentioned earlier), Google is well ahead of Baidu amongst high income and highly educated folks.
They're the kind of people that advertisers will pay big bucks to reach, especially in China, where the majority of people don't have much spending money.
So, atm, Baidu might have more users, but Google should be able to make more money.
Between Google and Baidu, which is truly the lesser of the two evils?
We always allude to "our" search engines because they don't suffer the same fate as Chinese web-produce - massive censorship. One just has to search Baidu for Tianamen Square Massacre. There are 3 (pro-Chinese) results. This is unlike Google that provides over 750 results for the same search term.
But then, Google isn't much better. One just has to look up Google for anything that could contrive the plans of a business, and the corporate entity will use the DMCA to somehow ban the disfavourable content.
Of course, I'd pick Google anyday. But it's hypocritical to state that Baidu is this horrid entity due to its censoring, when in fact this is common practice over here.
If you go to baidu.com and click MP3, you actually get to search for MP3s!!! No, no need to call captain obvious, I get why you're rolling your eyes.
Seriously though, I "baidued" jackson and I fond real honest to goodness songs of michael jackson, mp3 encodes available via http! It's like being in 97 all over again!
There's a Chinese saying about learning: it is like a leaf in the stream; if it does not move forward, it will be swept back. Google's managing to hold on to market share is a nontrivial achievement.
That said, there's a "them that has, gets" mechanism at work here. Just as we will see when Vista's out, user inertia is strong. Baidu may have its work cut out for it.
ICQ: 28651394 = AIM/MSN/YIM: hsuwh = www.livejournal.com/~banazir
There are simply no comparison between Google and Baidu. Google still try to do everything correctly, while Baidu think more fitting for the Chinese Culture, for example. If you type in the name of the singer and the song title, Baidu is willing to lead you to dozen of direct MP3 link to the download of that song without even touching any other site at all. There are simply no way Google can do that. The only reason Google will lose to Baidu is because Google can't have a fair fight with Baidu.
I lived in Beijing that last 20 months. Lots of times google was either being blocked or was offline. It was worse with google's specialized services like news.google.
I'm sure that the gov't is mandating educational institutions use something other than google as a home page when the browers starts up.
Remember, in a fascist oligarchy there is no true capitalist supply and demand. It makes no sense to even bother to try to figure out what is going on in that distorted economy.
Peace, or Not?
Everyone knows slashdotters never actualy read the article, so why bother linking to it?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yandex search engine -- http://www.yandex.ru/ -- always brings better results in Russian web. They search only russian nets and domains and this lets them index everything in Russian. Google will never enter this niche and local search engines will be always better than universal system.
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
Baidu means 100 degree or system, isn't that a play on Google (100 zeroes)?
I've never used the site (until Slashdot mentioned it searched MP3s) but I was reading a discarded magazine in a hostel in Beijing that was comparing the effectiveness of two major search engines' spyware campaigns -- not the morality, just the effectiveness of the business practice -- and just about every public computer I've seen is hosed with programs trying to redirect your query. As far as I know, that's not the kind of game Google plays, but I can't remember if Baidu was one of them.
Side note: Google.com is blocked maybe 10% of the time where I am, that can lose a lot of marketshare
My list of multiplayer