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...
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.
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.
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.
Only with a 2.6% stake??
I don't know, was yahoo hedging their bets with the 5% stake they had in google?
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.
their about page says "Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.".
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.
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.