Chinese Search Engines
You may recall mention in this space a while back of a Chinese search engine to which former American president Bill Clinton was lending his name. Accoona (www.accoona.com and also www.acoona.com) made a splash at its rollout and then seemed to disappear from the radar.
Mind you, negative press reaction at the time didn’t help, Clinton’s marketing forte notwithstanding. Various test searches by technical writers turned up incongruous results. It seems to me however that the real issue was that Accoona did nothing to define a new space in the search engine marketplace.
In early August another Chinese search engine put in an even splashier appearance, if stock price is to be taken as an indicator of substance.
Unlike Accoona, which returns results in English (a parallel site, www.accoona.cn returned Chinese results), the newcomer, BaiDu (www.baidu.com) is strictly for the Chinese marketplace.
Baidu (the name means “hundreds of times”) is considered the top search engine in China. China itself is the world’s second largest Internet market with around 100 million users online, and that’s a penetration of perhaps just 10% of the potential market in the country.
Little wonder that Google, even though it has long maintained a Chinese portal site (www.google.cn), chose to invest in Baidu more than a year ago. Mind you, it would seem that the developers are keeping the Google troops at arms length as the investment is little more than a percent or two.
That small investment though catapulted Baidu’s initial public offering to percentage gains not even seen by Google. Shares were issued at US$23 but opened on the Nasdaq at $66 and then shot up to close at almost $123.
A gain of around 350% in a day’s trading is significant to be sure but then again let’s put this in some perspective: Baidu is small compared to Google both in terms of market capitalization and in terms of revenue.
However, in terms of potential Baidu could well be another Google. Then again, the uncertainties of Chinese law could come into play. In fact, the company warns in its prospectus that Internet law in China is new and evolving. The rerouting of Internet traffic through government computers in mainland China poses a significant threat to growth prospects. In fact, some of Baidu’s growth came at Google’s expense when the California company’s engine was blocked by government censors.
In true Google fashion the Baidu site operators dressed up their bear paw print corporate logo with a Nasdaq “price tag” looped through one of the bear claws.
North American corporate involvement in Chinese search engine companies may be a bit of a double-edged sword. Government controls over electronic data flow have seen not only China-based but also western sites blocked when the leadership perceives a threat to its security measures.
Unfortunately, corporate greed occasionally means that common business standards are thrown by the wayside. So potentially large is the Chinese marketplace that an “anything it takes” mentality wins out.
In an embarrassing development, Yahoo! has been accused of complicity with the Chinese government over the jailing of a Hong Kong-based reporter who had forwarded a supposedly top-secret e-mail, through a Yahoo! account, from state officials expressing concerns over mention in the media of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy crackdown.
A release from media monitoring agency Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org), notes “We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well.”
The release goes on to note that “For years Yahoo! has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry", agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. Searches deemed sensitive by the Chinese authorities such as “Taiwan independence” in Chinese in the Yahoo! China search engine, retrieve only a limited and approved set of results.”
A couple of days later RWB called for Internet companies to be open on where they stand with respect to their human rights obligations, referencing directly not only Yahoo! but also Google and Microsoft, noting that all three have “adapted their services in China in ways that have restricted access to information.”
Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.
Mind you, negative press reaction at the time didn’t help, Clinton’s marketing forte notwithstanding. Various test searches by technical writers turned up incongruous results. It seems to me however that the real issue was that Accoona did nothing to define a new space in the search engine marketplace.
In early August another Chinese search engine put in an even splashier appearance, if stock price is to be taken as an indicator of substance.
Unlike Accoona, which returns results in English (a parallel site, www.accoona.cn returned Chinese results), the newcomer, BaiDu (www.baidu.com) is strictly for the Chinese marketplace.
Baidu (the name means “hundreds of times”) is considered the top search engine in China. China itself is the world’s second largest Internet market with around 100 million users online, and that’s a penetration of perhaps just 10% of the potential market in the country.
Little wonder that Google, even though it has long maintained a Chinese portal site (www.google.cn), chose to invest in Baidu more than a year ago. Mind you, it would seem that the developers are keeping the Google troops at arms length as the investment is little more than a percent or two.
That small investment though catapulted Baidu’s initial public offering to percentage gains not even seen by Google. Shares were issued at US$23 but opened on the Nasdaq at $66 and then shot up to close at almost $123.
A gain of around 350% in a day’s trading is significant to be sure but then again let’s put this in some perspective: Baidu is small compared to Google both in terms of market capitalization and in terms of revenue.
However, in terms of potential Baidu could well be another Google. Then again, the uncertainties of Chinese law could come into play. In fact, the company warns in its prospectus that Internet law in China is new and evolving. The rerouting of Internet traffic through government computers in mainland China poses a significant threat to growth prospects. In fact, some of Baidu’s growth came at Google’s expense when the California company’s engine was blocked by government censors.
In true Google fashion the Baidu site operators dressed up their bear paw print corporate logo with a Nasdaq “price tag” looped through one of the bear claws.
North American corporate involvement in Chinese search engine companies may be a bit of a double-edged sword. Government controls over electronic data flow have seen not only China-based but also western sites blocked when the leadership perceives a threat to its security measures.
Unfortunately, corporate greed occasionally means that common business standards are thrown by the wayside. So potentially large is the Chinese marketplace that an “anything it takes” mentality wins out.
In an embarrassing development, Yahoo! has been accused of complicity with the Chinese government over the jailing of a Hong Kong-based reporter who had forwarded a supposedly top-secret e-mail, through a Yahoo! account, from state officials expressing concerns over mention in the media of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy crackdown.
A release from media monitoring agency Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org), notes “We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well.”
The release goes on to note that “For years Yahoo! has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry", agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. Searches deemed sensitive by the Chinese authorities such as “Taiwan independence” in Chinese in the Yahoo! China search engine, retrieve only a limited and approved set of results.”
A couple of days later RWB called for Internet companies to be open on where they stand with respect to their human rights obligations, referencing directly not only Yahoo! but also Google and Microsoft, noting that all three have “adapted their services in China in ways that have restricted access to information.”
Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.
posted by Peter Vogel at 1:35 PM
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