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The Internet Businesses

Search Engines Set To Vie For China 194

Posted by michael from the great-firewall dept.
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."
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Search Engines Set To Vie For China More

Search Engines Set To Vie For China

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  • Talk about Chutzpah... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:42PM (#8532672) Journal
    "My job in China is to kick Google's ass," said Zhou Hongyi, the bespectacled founder and chief executive of 3721 Network Software,"

    He's gonna need an awfully big boot...

    • Are you saying google has a big arse?
      OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
      You're in trouble now.
      No man has ever survived that minefield.
      You wil just have to search the web somewhere else if you are going to make comments like that.

    • He's gonna need an awfully big boot...

      No, he'll just go pay off a government/military official and have Google blocked again. China is notorious for not playing fair and giving local companies huge advantages over foreign competition. I wish our own government would do this someday...
      • The US government does the same thing China does. Since you probably live in USA, or are heavily influenced by US government government propaganda, you wouldn't know. If you don't believe me, ask anyone from Latin America. Free trade did them a lot of good all right...

        Sivaram Velauthapillai

    • Wrong. (Score:3, Funny)

      by DAldredge ( 2353 )
      His job in china is to not get placed in Jail AND beat Google... If his search engine works too well and indexs the 'wrong' stuff he could face prison time.
      • His job in china is to not get placed in Jail AND beat Google... If his search engine works too well and indexs the 'wrong' stuff he could face prison time.

        Wow! A Chinese lawyer on Slashdot. Thank-you for sharing your insights with us!

  • No running water? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Havokmon ( 89874 )
    Apparently not everyone surfs on the john.

    • Wouldn't be that hard to setup. But I wonder, how can you have Electrical service needed to run internet connected PCs, but not have a space heater. I would expect a space heater to be much cheaper then a computer, and obviously more apealing in northern china.

      I mean, maybe the electricity is expensive, but arn't these people supposed to be communists? I know they're adapting but I would think that things like electricity would be a base service.

  • Chinese Search Engines (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kevx45 ( 654613 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:44PM (#8532698) Homepage Journal
    Wonder why China doesn't have a state-run search engine? They have a state-modified version of Linux (referring to RedStar Linux, I think...)

    Seriously though, China has the largest population in the world with India at a close second right now. OF course their internet usage is BOOMING. Good luck to all those who design the search engines.

    • Re:Chinese Search Engines (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think India has a larger poulation now actually
    • Yes, but would the people rather use a state owned, hugely filtered search engine or google which, even if it is cut down, will still be 1000x better?
      • That wasn't the point of the question. I would think, in China anyhow, that it wouldn't matter what the people wanted since government controls everything anyhow. And since China has the manpower resources, I would think they would just rip Google off and run their own search engine. Or something like that. Probably doesn't matter anyhow since in the next few years they'll probably do that anyhow.

        That's my two cents.

        Kev

  • Extra Radio Buttons? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by linmanux ( 23400 ) * on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:44PM (#8532701) Homepage Journal
    On the chinese google page [google.com], what are the three radio buttons for? I know my google [google.com] doesn't have them.
    • my guess would be different dialects of their language.
    • search the internet
      search Chinese Content in the internet
      Search symplified Chinese content in the internet

    • Re:Extra Radio Buttons? (Score:5, Informative)

      by robslimo ( 587196 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:51PM (#8532797) Homepage Journal
      (1) search all webpages (all languages)
      (2) search Chinese webpages
      (3) search (simplified) Chinese webpages

      I think the last one refers to the simplified written dialect.

      • Re:Extra Radio Buttons? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        >I think the last one refers to the simplified written dialect

        Something like that - Simplified Chinese (GB2312) as opposed to other locales (Hong Kong, Taiwan) which use Traditional Chinese (Big5).

        Google handles Chinese searches very well.

      • (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the site yet.)

        One of Mao's reforms in the 1940s was to simplify thousands of Chinese characters. These are called 'short-form' (jian ti zi). The people on Taiwan, however, were not subject to the update of the language, and 'long-form' characters (fan ti zi) were standard there for a long time. I believe the short-form versions have been adopted on a small scale.

        That the mainland China site offers both short- and long-form is probably an oblique assertion that [acco
        • Your asertion that short-form characters were adopted on a "small scale" is way off. Pretty much everything on the manland is written using it, and it's taught in schools. Outside of taiwan, most chinese is taught using short form. It kind of sucks, though, because long form is easier to read (IMO) because you are looking at more information to 'hook' onto. With computers, there is no diffrence in the amount of time it takes to write.

          • Your asertion that short-form characters were adopted on a "small scale" is way off.

            Your reading comprehension is way off: I was talking about the use of short-form characters in Taiwan, not mainland China. Can you address that or would you like to misread something else?

            As an aside, jiantizi still have the radicals and other visual and auditory clues [for reading] but are much easier to write when not using a computer, which is how at least 80% of mainland China does it. I don't think Mao was conc
        • Hong Kong and Macao also uses traditional (non-simplified) characters.
      • You know, switching between simple and traditional characters is pretty easy in software, there's a 1 to 1 correlation. I would expect most web browsers would support auto-conversion to the users prefrence...
    • "All web pages", "Web pages in Chinese" and "Web pages in Simplified Chinese".

  • BusinessWeek articles on the internet in china (Score:5, Informative)

    by andy1307 ( 656570 ) * on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:45PM (#8532707)
    China.Net [businessweek.com]
    China will soon be No. 1 in Web users. That will unleash a world of opportunity

    An Open Society Online? Not Yet [businessweek.com]

    eBay's Patient Bid on China [businessweek.com]

  • That sounds like an endorsement of Communism (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:45PM (#8532720)
    "Thanks to China [where] obstacles such as competing vested interests aren't as influential, so internet infrastructure is going in at a rapid pace."

    Or at the very least, of dictators. Yay for the efficiency that comes with lack of choice!
    • Actually, I dont think it means that per-se - more that you a virtually clean playing field to start off on... Its the classic story of combined and uneven development (to quote some Marxist economist).

      Basically, for example, in the US, the development of Cell Phone standards was screwed by competing behemoths that already had a stranglehold on the telecoms market. Ditto with Broadband/DSL deployment. I guess in China, they have nothing much, so they will start off with the now state of the Art... whereas

  • Just a simple(?) question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:45PM (#8532721) Homepage Journal
    There is much emphasis on the "growing" market for computers/internet stuff in China, and everyone who is anyone is trying to get into that market.

    But does it really exist? The government has shown a marked distaste for anything that may threaten their power/viewpoint, and with many poor people in china (farmers, et al) does this market really exist, or are large corps. trying to forcibly open them up like they did with Japan in the early times?
    • The times they are changing...

      But does it really exist? The government has shown a marked distaste for anything that may threaten their power/viewpoint, and with many poor people in china (farmers, et al) does this market really exist, or are large corps. trying to forcibly open them up like they did with Japan in the early times?

      Mao, back during the 1920's fond his support in the overlooked and abused peasants, abused first by the outgoing Manchu Dynasty then by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. In the ba


      • Expect the peasants to lose considerable clout.

        I was playing my favorite RTS the other day and my peasants took down a wolly mammoth. They are hard to beat with their pitchforks, torches, and mob mentality. Dont underestimate the little guys!
      • Mao, back during the 1920's fond his support in the overlooked and abused peasants,

        Yup, and then he fucked them harder then they'd ever been fucked before. Under Mao, peasents had a quota of grain they had to provide to the government, and a perminant minder. Pesants would often go hungry if they couldn't provide enough grain to meet their quota, even though they had produced more then enough to feed themselves. If they produced extra grain, they could only sell it at extra low prices. Mao's incompi
      • Expect the peasants to lose considerable clout.

        There is no such thing as peasents; rather it's more like low class (as opposed to upper classes). In any case, they are already struggling these days. The restructuring of the Chinese economy meant that millions of lower class people were put out of jobs. So right now you have the situation where some people in the coastal areas are getting very rich while the interior is poor. A lot of these so-called migrants flock to the cities but they still struggle.
    • well, just 15% of the Chinese population is still 50% larger than all of Japan's population. China's economy has been growing steadily. Same with India. Even when a majority are poor, a small minority still adds up to A LOT of people.

      From the CIA factbook.

      Population:
      China: 1.287 billion
      India: 1.05 billion
      USA: 0.290 billion
      Japan: 0.127 billion

    • Since before the west (and Japan) worked at divvying the country up in the 19th century, businesses have been salivating over how much money they'd make if only they could sell shoes, or a steak, or a sports shirt, or a Yugo, to every person in China. The calculations always amount to "if we could only sell to X percentage of the population, well, multiply that by our profit margin and... wow!"

      This is the neocolonial version, embedded in internet bubble-think. You may as well insert that step that shows u

    • There is much emphasis on the "growing" market for computers/internet stuff in China, and everyone who is anyone is trying to get into that market. But does it really exist?
      The western media makes a big deal about the lack of freedom in China, but what about the attitude of the Chinese? Most people there don't seem to believe that they are being oppressed. None of the Chinese immigrants I know seem to care about the lack of "freedom" in China (okay, so I don't know any Falun Gong).

      They didn't grow up in
      • But how many people do you know that were at Tiananmen Square?

        If you grow up without the concept of freedom, then perhaps you haven't lost anything (or don't know any better) but when (if?) the internet comes in full force, and the people see what they might never have had...what then?
        • Most people don't care about freedom, they just live their lives the way the government wants. They think it only affects "dissidents". Just look at America. 40% don't think the patriot act goes far enough. Lots of people think the press has too much freedom(!!!).

          Love of freedom is something that some people have an inate desire for, but for most people that isn't true. However, it can be sold and packaged by like any product (for example, equate personal freedom with national freedom and make persona
      • Asking a Chinese living under totalitarianism whether they are free is like asking an American whether their government is imperialist? Because governments spend billions of dollars on propaganda and disinformation (we all know how it worked for the Iraqi war and their WMD), the citizens in any nation are "brainwashed" and more likely to toe the government, or conformist, view.

        Sivaram Velauthapillai

  • VI or Emacs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by j0keralpha ( 713423 ) * on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:45PM (#8532722)
    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...
    • Maybe, or perhaps China may come up with a better algorithm still.

      I look at it in the perspective that the Chinese have a unique cultural outlook on life and philosophy that has been sharpened and refined over millenia. Odds are fairly good that they could put it to use in finding a way to do something (searching stuff online in a most relevant way) that many still regard as an art more than as an exercise in math and coding.

      (man, emacs is ugly enough in English... I don't wanna know how many fingers wou

      • What's more, since these algorithms test language, some of the languages used by China might be better suited to searching... or not.

  • Google Cache Pages for China? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by abcxyz ( 142455 ) * on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:45PM (#8532725) Homepage
    I just looked, and the cached page link is there. Do you mean that they aren't caching links to CN sites?
    • Apart from this article, I wasn't aware that Google's cache functions had been disabled at all in China. Indeed, it doesn't seem all that possible since the Chinese can surely still use the English version to the same devices.

      The Chinese authorities however did at one point block both Google and Altavista - dubbed "The Chinese Firewall" by the press - due to the fact that sites that they explicitly blocked from viewing could be accessed through Google's cache.
    • Wow, this is actually news! I've been working in China for over 1,5 years and only now I can access the Google cache.

      Before, if you accessed e.g. http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:jo3aRe29uHsJ:s lashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 then you received timeouts. Only way round it would be by using proxies (encrypted if possible). They seem to have improved their Firewall of China and now let users look at "unclassified" Google caches.

  • I can vouch for... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by robslimo ( 587196 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:47PM (#8532758) Homepage Journal
    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 [slashdot.org], the username is a product of frustration after losing the pwd to RatOmeter [slashdot.org].

  • 3721? (Score:4, Funny)

    by c_oflynn ( 649487 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:48PM (#8532765)
    What is 3721 for? That like 1337 in chinese or something?

    • Re:3721? (Score:4, Informative)

      by bcolflesh ( 710514 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:54PM (#8532844) Homepage
      From their FAQ [3721.com]:

      "Q: Where does the name 3721 come from?
      The founders believed that 3721 was an appropriate name for the company, as 3721 is a Chinese saying that means "No matter 3 by 7 is 21, Just do it." The name is also suitable since it is a number, therefore the company's website URL is the same in English and Chinese - which is in line with 3721's philosophy of making the Internet simple for users."
      • 'The founders believed that 3721 was an appropriate name for the company, as 3721 is a Chinese saying that means "No matter 3 by 7 is 21, Just do it."'

        I bet Nike's lawyers are getting ready to 'just do it'..

      • Oddly enough the name Yakuza is based on a number too. Ya-Ku-Za. 8-9-3. A losing hand in the game hanafuda.
    • 3721 --> 3 + 7 + 2 + 1 = 13

      13 --> 1 + 3 = 4

      Uh-oh. Looks like they're dead.

  • Baidu.com mp3 search :) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by joeldg ( 518249 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:50PM (#8532789) Homepage
    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.

  • No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Perianwyr Stormcrow ( 157913 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:53PM (#8532819) Homepage
    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.
    • 10 years ago, it was 99% little houses and vegetable carts.

      Gradually, there will be more and more high rise apartment buildings to replace these houses. This will make sense as both the population grows and as people slowly gain personal riches to afford better living conditions.
    • I am student in US from China, my parents in China are using aDSL which I can not afford in US. I think there are millions of people using aDSL in China
      • It's so much easier to get high speed networks going when the population density is as high as that of a Chinese city (this is the case across all of Asia- S. Korea is highly wired simply because its population is extremely dense.)

  • Slashdot Double Standards (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pave Low ( 566880 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:53PM (#8532822) Journal
    How come we don't see the 'Google Violates Human Rights in China' like we did with Microsoft? [slashdot.org]

    Just curious.

  • MS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aidanjpadden ( 314134 )
    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?
    • and 3721 install its IE plugin to whereever it can. I bet it is the most hated search engine by Chinese people.
  • Anyone ever looked at google.cn [google.cn]? It doesn't looks like it follows the usual google style. Mabye someone is trying to beat google out in china.
  • 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.
    • The other thing about Chinese is the dialects in most case are only different in pronouciation. So as search engines only read things and listen nothing, most dialects are the same.
    • granted, India has more languages and dialects, but it's important to keep in mind that naming the distinction is mostly arbitrary. Two people can consider themselves to speak the same language, but the differences in their language can be greater than those that for identity or historical reasons call their language a different name.

      Second, most educated people in India also know English. Granted, most people in India cannot afford to be educated, but neither can they afford computers and internet to do

      • granted, India has more languages and dialects, but it's important to keep in mind that naming the distinction is mostly arbitrary. Two people can consider themselves to speak the same language, but the differences in their language can be greater than those that for identity or historical reasons call their language a different name.

        But that wasn't the OP's point; he was merely saying it would be much more difficult, technically speaking, than it is for Chinese, to take search engines to all Indians, wh

    • I speak five (Indian) languages, and have always wondered at Google's ability at searching Unicode characters across all languages (and, of course, their commitment to serving their UI in many [google.com] Indian [google.com] languages [google.com]).

      The difficulty, therefore, is not in terms of *languages* per se, but in terms of encoding; 99% of the stuff out there in my mother tongue, Telugu, uses non-Unicode rendering with proprietary fonts (often dynamic, so the display gets screwed up in browsers other than IE). Not to mention the fact tha

  • Unless China blocks them for showing anti-government material.

  • Priorities (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 11, 2004 @12:58PM (#8532879)
    houses without heat or running water may actually have internet access.

    Glad to see they have their priorities straight.

  • The question is.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @01:00PM (#8532899) Journal
    .. 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.
  • It's all Greek to me.

  • Internet in China (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Vexware ( 720793 )

    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 gove

  • My Favorite China Internet Statistics (Score:3, Informative)

    by MoreOrLess ( 117500 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @01:07PM (#8532972)
    From CIA World Factbook on China:

    Internet Providers: 3 (2000)
    Internet Users: 45.8 million (2002)

    Now I know these are dated, but c'mon ya'll, someone open up some ISPs there!! Do you think it's the government stifling competitior, or just that AOL can't afford to mail out 1.3 billion CDs there...
  • ..SEARCHED BY CHINESE!

  • i can't read (Score:3, Funny)

    by happyfrogcow ( 708359 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @01:09PM (#8532993)
    "Yes Captain, our engines have been set to 'Fuscia'"

    "No Leutenant! Not out engines, our Search engines!"

    "Yes sir, setting search engines to 'Fuscia'"

    "Fuscia!? No, set them to 'Vie'"

    "Violet, Sir?"

    "Leutenant, set our search engines to 'vie', thats an order!"

    "What color is 'Vie', Sir?"

    ...At this point in the little theatre in my mind, I realized what the headline was trying to say.

  • 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.

    What good is the growth of network infrastructure when users cannot communicate freely or visit unapproved websites? "Vested interests" of Chinese citizens are routinely trampled by a gang of Communist cronies. Why is that so great? Seems to me that the network simply another way to en

    • A tightly controled population is still capable of buying as much Nike Coke MacDonalds and Ford as a free one. Business is probably also doing very nicely with a very loose regulatory framework.

      What people missunderstand about China is that though it comes from a place of centralised state economic control, that the government is strongly committed to rapid economic growth. Growth that is happening. There are many contries that have gone from largely agricultural economies to modern industrialisation in 20
  • in China are like a mouse who thinks can get the cheese from a trap. Chinese will always keep a step ahead and keep on asking for various "features". Just take a look what they're doing to CPUs (Intel won't be able to sell soon) and Wi-Fi chips.

    Search engines will be the same. Chinese will demand that they be able to censor anything they want. They'll be asking for backdoors and ways to track who accesses what.

    Just when you think you've jumped through the last hoop, there will be another one waiting for y
  • 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, [kuro5hin.org] and Microsoft [com.com] have been catering their software to permit Chinese censorship. The Chinese government has also been active in removing certain keywords [newscientist.com] from use in popular search engines, like google.
    If I type in 'Falun Gong' or 'VIP Reference' [rand.org] (page 30-31)' in any of these new search engines, I recieve no content. Sure these my offer
  • So, what's that supposed to mean? I've noticed that Chinese people tend to use numbers as stand ins for Chinese characters that have similar pronunciations, but what is san chi er yi supposed to mean?

    One of the most interesting is using 88 rather then ttyl when signing of instant messanges. 88 = "bai bai" :P
    • 3721: 3x7=21. In the Cantonese speaking part of China (at least in Hong Kong), 3927 is the more common variant. Its mean is like "whatsoever".

      The sentence is like "I don't care 3721, let's go to the pub before heading back home"
  • There's a couple of points in the BBC article that are very misleading, which I'd like to draw attention to.

    The worst issue is when the lady being interviewed says "Everywhere we go there are good internet connections." This statement needs to be qualified, since a good "broadband" internet connection in China is typically on par with a decent dialup setup in the US. Most Chinese cities have less bandwidth than a typical large state university. The city I lived in until recently only had 2 T3 lines for

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