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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Losing Ground in China? 192

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the we-have-seen-this-before dept.
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?
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Google Losing Ground in China? More

Google Losing Ground in China?

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  • Oh Goody (Score:5, Funny)

    by CunningNickName ( 900555 ) <phaishazamkhan@gmail.com> on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:24PM (#13480881) Journal
    At least there's one country where Ballmer doesn't have to fucking kill Google and Larry Page.

    190 to go...

    • At least there's one country where Ballmer doesn't have to fucking kill Google and Larry Page.

      Ironically, one where he could probably get away with it.

      • Nah. The Chinese government is corrupt and repressive, not lawless. They're not about to let anything like that happen on their watch. The murder of foreigners is frowned upon, to say the least (even by other foreigners).
        • The Chinese government is corrupt and repressive, not lawless.


          If they're corrupt, then Ballmer could probably bribe them.... it's not like he's short on cash.

          • 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).

  • Duh... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:24PM (#13480885) Homepage
    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*.

  • and maybe suso.cn too (Score:3, Informative)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:24PM (#13480886) Journal
    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.
    • Do you have a little blurb in Chinese that says "Maybe you're looking for suso.cn?"

      It'd only be the nice thing to do, and I doubt it would have to take up much space

    • Re:and maybe suso.cn too (Score:4, Informative)

      by blackicye ( 760472 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:29AM (#13481359)
      Hate to break it to you, but your friend is either pulling your leg or ill informed.

      Suso means nothing like fast and/or search in Mandarin. The site appears to be some kind of entertainment portal / message board.

      And it uses the Google, Baidu and Yahoo China search engines to conduct its searches.

      A more likely explanation would be that the existing search site suso.cn was already very popular or heavily advertised in China.

      And yes I am a native speaker of Mandarin and several Chinese dialects (Hokkien [Fujian], Henghwa [a Hokkien sub dialect], Cantonese and a little Teochew)

      • Re:and maybe suso.cn too (Score:2, Informative)

        by suso ( 153703 ) *
        Pulling your leg (doubt it), ill informed (she is a lawyer, but of course that doesn't mean anything). This girl that I asked is Mandarin Chinese. I would think she would know. Do you speak Chinese natively? She did say that combination of su and so were strange though and you wouldn't normally use it in Chinese.

        • Re:and maybe suso.cn too (Score:4, Informative)

          by znode ( 647753 ) * <znode&gmx,de> on Monday September 05, 2005 @02:00AM (#13481645) Homepage
          I confirm the lawyer. "Su" is the first character of "su4 du4", meaning speed. "So" is the first character of "so1 suo3", or search.

          See http://babel.altavista.com/tr?&trtext=speed+rummag e&lp=en_zh [altavista.com], and you should see 4 characters if your browser supports it. Take the first and the third, and that's "suso".

          I don't blame blackicye though. I didn't recognize "suso" at first either. Since Mandarin Chinese syllables have 4 inflections (5 if you want to classify short as an inflection), we'd have to mentally run through at least a few combinations before we recognize a phrase.

          And yes, I'm a native speaker. Mandarin and Hangzhou dialect.
  • I see italitized text, but no link to the article itself.

  • Just doesn't have the same ring to it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:28PM (#13480905)

    Looking for information on a subject? Just Bi>Baidu it!

    Nope..not the same at all...

  • Baidu is better than Google in China (Score:5, Informative)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 ) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:29PM (#13480910)
    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?

    • Re:Baidu is better than Google in China (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tksh ( 816129 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:46PM (#13481000)

      Not to mention that Baidu tends to do better on Chinese queries. A lot of times when I'm trying to find lyrics to some song or some proverb, Google will fail but Baidu will give me results.

      Coupled with the MP3 search, image search, discussion board serach, and page caching, it already offers what most people would use Google for. I know I don't bother with Google for Chinese queries now.

    • Not for long (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john.lamar@g m a i l . com> on Sunday September 04, 2005 @11:29PM (#13481164) Homepage Journal
      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 [china.org.cn]. 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.
    • Google's performance is generally pretty bad for Asian languages, at least compared to the way they dominate English language searches. Remember back in 1996 when you were using Hotbot and had to go through pages and pages of irrelevant results trying to find the one link that would have an answer to a simple question? Thats like what using Google to find Japanese is at the moment. I got asked last week to find some details for the boss on a new "digital paper" product that got debuted at the Aichi Expo.
      • I got asked last week to find some details for the boss on a new "digital paper" product that got debuted at the Aichi Expo. After fifteen minutes of fruitless banging away at Google with the obvious Japanese search terms (including the exact name of the product!), I found the company's press release in English on the first I'm Feeling Lucky, and then clicked the "Japanese" button at the top of their interface.

        Really. Might I enquire exactly what search terms you used in Japanese?

        The reason I ask is that g

    • Re:Baidu is better than Google in China (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm a chinese, google's "cached" does not work in china (maybe not the whole china but in most of the cities), and if you do some searching at google, the TCP link could be reset (maybe for some "bad words" on some pages).

      This is a big reason why many people no more use google.

  • At least Google owns (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slobber ( 685169 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:29PM (#13480913)
    a 2.6 percent stake in Baidu... Is Google hedging its bets to some extent?
  • How does this site work, anyway?

  • Does Google care? (Score:5, Informative)

    by richdun ( 672214 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:35PM (#13480941)
    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.

  • I just returned from China (Score:5, Informative)

    by Therlin ( 126989 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:40PM (#13480970)
    Most of the computers we came across in China were indeed using Baidu as their start up page.

    Just saying...

  • "English" spelling (Score:5, Informative)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:40PM (#13480972) Homepage
    Many Chinese people can't spell "google". I mean, what if some famous Chinese site launched in America, and it was called "mienfei.com" or something? Heck, I never liked the name "google" myself, either...it's a silly corruption of a word that was silly in the first place.

    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 [baidu.com], it's got "mp3 search" right on the front page. And check out this site [520music.com], it's got plenty of entire albums available for your listening pleasure, and it's a legitimate site in China.

    • And check out this site [520music.com], it's got plenty of entire albums available for your listening pleasure, and it's a legitimate site in China

      Pretty cool, but the U2 songs I downloaded from them were only 22 kbps. (Far short of the 128kbps offered by iTunes, and no where near my preferred quality: 192kbps.)
    • 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).

      Sadly, in the US, such nationalism is frowned upon. If you do think that way, you'll be called a racist/sexist/nationalist/somethingist.
      • USA has a lot of nationalism, except you guys call it patriotism. The nationalism in China is far worse (mostly because it's easier to influence hte population with propaganda under totalitarian systems) but don't for a minute assume that USA is not nationalist...
        • USA has a lot of nationalism, except you guys call it patriotism. The nationalism in China is far worse (mostly because it's easier to influence hte population with propaganda under totalitarian systems) but don't for a minute assume that USA is not nationalist...

          The US isn't really patriotic. It's fashionable to call yourself patriotic, but there's no real patriotism here.

          From the American flags and yellow ribbon stickers that are made in China, to shopping at Wal-Mart where everything is made in China, p

  • MP3 search (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:41PM (#13480975)
    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.

    • Re:MP3 search (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dasunt ( 249686 )

      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.

      Problem: Google has Chinese Competition.

      Solution:

      1. Submit story to Slashdot about Baidu.
      2. Casually mention that it supports media search.
      3. Geek horde engages in massive piracy.
      4. RIAA/MPAA, following footsteps of geek horde, launches a legal strike through dark incantations of internation
  • Yeah, and no doubt we're going to see it again in a couple days.

  • Thank God! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:46PM (#13480997)
    For a minute there I thought we were going to go a WHOLE FUCKING DAY without a story about Google [slashdot.org]. 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.

  • The Link to the story... (Score:3, Informative)

    by thenetbox ( 809459 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:48PM (#13481007)
    is probably:

    Google Losing Ground in China [yahoo.com]

  • Any Chinese Speakers Here? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:50PM (#13481016) Homepage
    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.

  • Fixed article, maybe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:50PM (#13481017)
    TG should've written "The Associated Press has an article [technologyreview.com] about a recent study (English PDF) [cnnic.net.cn] 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 [baidu.com] Inc. boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google [google.com] 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.

  • That's normal (Score:4, Informative)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:54PM (#13481034) Homepage
    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.
    • Yahoo Japan [yahoo.co.jp] and goo [goo.ne.jp] provide far better searching of Japanese sites than Google [google.co.jp]. As someone used to using nothing but google for English and French language searches, I find it pretty shocking just how bad google's Japanese results are.

      • I admit I haven't tried goo, but I have tried Yahoo a number of times, and I've always found that Google gives me better results (yes, in Japanese). Though I admit it's possible I'm subconsciously working around whatever limitations Google may have--come to think of it, ISTR it doesn't consider hiragana and katakana equivalent, which would certainly be a major drawback.

  • Baidu.com (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04, 2005 @10:55PM (#13481037)

    How the hell does that company have any market share at all? It's in some crazy foreign language or something.

  • Yahoo says Google is losing market share in China. Tomorrow Google will say Yahoo is losing market share in Europe. Tuesday dogpile will say that internet search engine usage is down worldwide and encyclopedia britanica will offer a discount on Hard Copy Encyclopedias on Wednesday.
    • This will be followed by a press release from the RIAA about how music piraters are "flooding the Internet with traffic and preventing legitimate businesses from getting work done" with some graphs. Slashdot will post a dubious story about how Microsoft is the root cause of the problem. This post will then be followed by another, almost identical.
  • It doesn't even know where Slashdot [baidu.com] is!

    I can't find slashdot anywhere in the first few pages, but Google shows up a lot.

  • Google is often censored (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • Comments/Questions 1) Doesn't baidu.com look a lot like google? 2) If Baidu.com basically links you directly to illegal music and movies what's stopping us, I mean certain people's, from using it?
    • Soon to come: The Great Inside Firewall of America. aka: TGIF America
      Brought to you by the RIAA, MPAA, etc.

    • >If Baidu.com basically links you directly to illegal music and movies what's stopping us, I mean certain people's, from using it?

      The fact that the Chinese government remixes all mp3's in Mandarin first, to avoid possible WTO sanctions. Would you want to download _this_ from Baidu?

      nirvana_smells_like_teen_spirit.mp3

      Hoi, chingy...chong, pingy...pong, chi chi tzuuuUUU mah tsi wha...

  • Baidu is easier to use when searching in Chinese (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04, 2005 @11:39PM (#13481196)
    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.

  • Firefox's default mp3.baidu.com search bar (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When I recently installed Firefox Simplified Chinese edition on a colleague's computer, I realized the search bar came with the mp3.baidu.com search engine as one of the default options. It's kinda weird that Mozilla incorporates that by default. I mean, I don't get isohunt search by default. Are the default search engines in the search bar sponsered ads of sort?
  • This is a bit of a moot point considering Google acquired a minority stake in Baidu [clickz.com] back in 2004.
  • 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
  • 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 [baidu.com]. 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 [google.com] the plans of a business, and the corpor
    • Perhaps if you used a Chinese-language search on a Chinese-language search engine, you might have had different results.

      And if you do decide to search in English on a Chinese-language search engine, you could at least spell "Tiananmen" correctly.

      What is the DMCA crap, karma whoring? You forgot to throw in a derogatory comment about Bush as well.

    • Re:Which is the lesser of the two evils? (Score:5, Informative)

      by znode ( 647753 ) * <znode&gmx,de> on Monday September 05, 2005 @02:26AM (#13481744) Homepage
      You're not getting results because you're not spelling it correctly. It's tiananmen, not tianamen.

      Spelled correctly, Baidu [baidu.com] shows 777 results. Google [google.com] gets 50100.

      ... 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.)

      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.
    • What? Are you implying that you think the fact that there isn't a company whose business plan is "bunny suicide" proves that Google censors content? That's pretty idiotic. How about ... bunnies have no money, so selling them suicide is even dumber than selling it to humans (who, of course, are capable of acquiriing it for free).

  • Mp3s: No WONDER it's gaining share! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by __aailob1448 ( 541069 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:18AM (#13481321) Journal
    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!

  • Steady as she goes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hsuwh ( 262614 )
    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.

  • Hear something from a Chinese's prespective... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ID000001 ( 753578 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:27AM (#13481352)
    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.

  • Google goes offline periodically. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jjn1056 ( 85209 ) <`jjn1056' `at' `yahoo.com'> on Monday September 05, 2005 @12:49AM (#13481416) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Remember, in a fascist oligarchy there is no true capitalist supply and demand.

      Thanks for reminding us. Maybe that's why everyone's having such a hard time figuring out supply and demand these days when the only important things on the government's agenda are how to get more money for the large corporations who run the show and how to get more popular support for war. Fascist oligarchies DO make capitalism impossible. But China is Communist. The United States is moving closer and closer to the fascist oli

  • Smart (Score:4, Funny)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @01:16AM (#13481488) Homepage Journal
    Everyone knows slashdotters never actualy read the article, so why bother linking to it?
    • I wonder how many people noticed there wasn't a link; I didn't, as I always scan the comments looking for the probable "This is fake / false / otherwise crap, and here's why" first...

      But if you can get a non-linked article past the editors, what's to stop getting a wrongly-linked one through? Goatse anyone? (IIRC that actually happened a week or two back...)

  • I really can't feel sorry for them. I could possibly root for Google's Chinese engine if they didn't cowtow to Beijing's censorhsip regime, but so long as they're both self-censoring, I find myself more in favor of their homegrown competitors because they at least have an excuse.

  • The same happened in Russia, too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by burbilog ( 92795 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @02:30AM (#13481752) Homepage
    Yandex search engine -- http://www.yandex.ru/ [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.
  • http://mp3.baidu.com/ [baidu.com] then select "MP3" checkbutton. Enter author or title, get direct links to MP3 downloads. Wish Google had something like this! :D
  • Because in Korea, only old people use Google.
  • A part of the advantage held by local search engines is that they're less censored and more politically trusted than Google.

    And we don't know nothing of performance hit that censorship overhead imposes on Google. Maybe it screwes their indexing (they have to exclude more pages than they'd like to, while the local guys already have developed technologies for automated and neat removal of censored information/sites) or searching procedures.

    The Chinese-related features that some guys here mentioned aren't that
  • When Bidu IPOed a few weeks ago on the NASDAQ, it skyrocketed to some insane level [yahoo.com]. It subsequently fell back but maybe the markets knew that BIDU was going to be big in China. I still think BIDU is mostly hype (I would never pay for an established company that has a P/E of 1000+) but it remains to be seen.

    The search engine (eg. google) and internet commerce (eg. ebay) are big battlegrounds in China...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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 Go

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