The question of why Baidu continues to outperform Google in the world's largest internet user-base has fueled much discussion. I explore business practices and cultural factors that may have fueled this advantage in an article for China International Business this month.
But while Baidu leads now, there's a possibility that Google's strength in the "cloud computing" world may lead to gains in the long run.
A week after the Sichuan earthquake lit up instant messengers and Twitter, Google statistics show a huge drop in searches during a national moment of silence.
Google China users stopped searching almost completely during a national moment of silence on May 19, 2008
(Credit: Google China)Users apparently observed the silence while sitting at their computers. Meanwhile many people around the country paused.
My experience seems a bit odd in retrospect. Having just landed in Shenzhen, a Mainland metropolis across the border from Hong Kong, I found people at the pick-up area speechless, but surrounded by blaring bus horns. I considered the possibility that the sound, which I couldn't determine the source of at the time, was an air raid siren or fire alarm. I still don't know if it was just angry drivers who wondered why traffic had stopped or a sort of alarm to mark the moment. [UPDATE: My friend Austin Ramzy writes that rescue vehicles honked in Sichuan as well.]
I spent the following week in Hong Kong, where the earthquake of course dominated the news and much discussion among foreign journalists. Now in Shanghai, acquaintances reported seeing people crowded around the television yesterday. When I got online again, I knew it was the newest aftershock.
Television seems to be dominated by hopeful stories. Record rescues, hard-working soldiers sifting through rubble, national leaders consoling and rallying earthquake victims. Foreign media on the other hand broadcasts its usual extremely sad images. Mothers digging through concrete slabs looking for children, sons wearing lost fathers' clothing.
A three-day period of mourning last week was marked online by the temporary shutting of several entertainment websites, including Tudou, and myriad commemorative displays.
Whether people here know anyone in the affected areas or not, the national character of this ongoing loss of life is impossible to avoid.
Link via Jacky Peng and Global Voices Online
Google is slated to release a robust Chinese-English dictionary featuring 13 dictionaries in collaboration with Kingsoft, a producer of PC-based dictionaries, according to a Chinese blog that I will inadequately translate as "Dances With Google."
The new product will drop Thursday at 2:30 a.m. China time, according to the blog. It will include such things as menu items, which are often perilously mistranslated into English.
A trio of mobile companies including two global giants will collaborate to find more ways to profit from and develop mobile phone-based internet use, the Financial Times reported.
Vodafone, the biggest-earning mobile company, China Mobile, the company with the largest user base, and Softbank, the third-place Japanese carrier, form the coalition.
FT writes, "The collaboration underlines how mobile operators are keen to stop internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo dominating the provision of potentially lucrative services on the wireless internet."
Indeed, Google is working on ever more wireless applications. At WWW2008 in Beijing on Wednesday, Google's president for Greater China, Kai-Fu Lee, gave a speech on "cloud computing" -- the idea that data will be stored online and accessible from a variety of devices, following users from device to device rather than tying people to individual machines.
A catalyst for this kind of usage, he said, is the iPhone. "As the Apple iPhone hit the market our back end servers really noticed," Lee said. "Even though the iPhone's [market] share is not large, on a per-phone basis the web usage is about 15 times more than other web-capable phones."
Mobile carriers so far have not been noted for their excellence in designing mobile services. With giants like Google, Yahoo, and Baidu on the scene, the carriers will have their work cut out for them. Perhaps we should expect to see joint-development deals...
I'm now sitting in the opening keynote of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) here in Beijing, adjacent to the newly opened Olympic Stadium.
The first presentation is by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China. He's talking about "cloud computing," the general term for developing ways to turn our computer lives into something not tied to any single device.
So far, he's been outlining what cloud computing is, something that he admits is not news to anyone in this room full of industry and academic researchers, and highlighting all of Google's already deployed cloud components -- Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa, etc.
Now he's talking about the power of distributed computing for operations such as search that, as he said "are very hard to do with one computer, or even a very powerful computer." He added, "A cloud computer should have at its disposal a virtually infinite amount of disk, an infinite amount of processing power."
More to come... Follow me on Twitter at gwbstr. E-mail sinobyte@gwbstr.com if you're here and would like to get in touch!
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's foundation received an undisclosed sum in exchange for his keynote address at an event held by Alibaba, the Chinese internet company that controls China Yahoo* and has been accused of aiding China's crackdown in Tibet.
China Yahoo posted images of individuals sought by the government.
(Credit: France24 via Rebecca MacKinnon)Some activists are trying to tie this money to Sen. Hillary Clinton, saying it conflicts with her statements on China. In addition to claiming she "stood up to" China's government in a speech while Bill was president, she has said President George W. Bush should not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in August because of the recent events in Tibet.
Bill's foundation took Alibaba's money. Alibaba has been criticized recently for an incident in which Yahoo.cn posted a "most wanted" page with photographs of individuals the government sought in connection with the recent unrest. Here, according to the Los Angeles Times how one activist makes the connection from there to Hillary's position:
"A former president of the United States received a donation from a Chinese firm that is involved in censorship, and now his wife is running for president. This is a shame of the U.S.," said Harry Wu, an exiled Chinese activist based in Washington.
I'm all for responsibility with money in politics, but I think this is a stretch. Wu references China Yahoo's censorship of search results. But Microsoft's MSN and Google both also censor results in their Chinese versions. Should candidates then be penalized for taking money from Bill Gates or Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Oh right, the question is, should candidates' spouses be penalized for having any relationship involving money with these three or their companies?
I think it would be hard to make a principled argument that didn't condemn all of the candidates if closely examined. If you want to condemn them all for dealing with money in politics, I won't blame you.
* I have not always been perfectly clear on this. China Yahoo is a subsidiary of Alibaba and is no longer controlled by Yahoo itself, despite the name.
William Long at Moonlight Blog reports that YouTube is again accessible from his connection in China.
I'm in Osaka, Japan, but a friend in Beijing, who prefers to be identified as "Hot Mama in Beijing," confirms.
Hot Mama adds an anecdote: Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, "This content is not available in your country." Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google's part. Mama reports that YouTube soon went completely dark, until just now.
Another glitch that emerged, which may suggest some sort of Google involvement, is that when Mama was sending Gmail messages, anything containing the nonredacted T%%%, or even its first three letters, would return an error message she'd never seen, stating that there was an error while sending.
This is by no means certain to be Google involvement. Transmitting sensitive keywords may have triggered a stall that Google recognized as trouble--something Hot Mama would not have usually seen in Beijing or New England. Similarly, YouTube may have correctly interpreted the block and redirected to a human readable error page rather than the usual "reset connection."
I asked Hot Mama, who also wanted me to mention she's a truck driver (seriously), to try to access her Gmail, which had been terribly slow, using an anti-censorship micro-tactic: Instead of accessing http://mail.google.com, go for https://mail.google.com. The result was stark, she said. Everything loaded much faster. This suggests that encrypted communications are not being seriously delayed but that language filters are engaging a larger portion of traffic than usual.
The YouTube messages are still vexing. Was YouTube cooperating or was this a very smart error message? To have a Google property that's not Google China itself cooperating with Chinese censorship would be unprecedented, to my knowledge.
Baidu.com, the top Chinese search engine, gets lots of its traffic from a service that tracks and links to MP3s, most of which are illegally posted. Now a Chinese music industry group is suing the site over alleged copyright violation.
The AP reports:
Music Copyright Society official Qu Jingming said in a statement posted on the society's Web site Friday that Baidu.com provided "music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its Web site without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits."
The copyright society said its lawsuit, filed in a Beijing court in January, claims Baidu used 50 songs illegally and demands compensation. The alleged piracy forced legitimate online-music providers to shut down, the industry group said.
This comes at a time when Google, which is hoping to catch up to Baidu in the Chinese market, is working with record companies to provide legal links to music for searchers.
From The Times of London:
A former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party, plans to sue Yahoo and Google in the United States for blocking his name from search results in China.
Guo Quan, an expert on classical Chinese literature and the 1937 Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops, last week issued an open letter pledging to bring a lawsuit against Google after he discovered that his name had been excised in searches of its Google.cn portal in China.
He told The Times that he had now found that the Chinese Yahoo site had also blocked his name and that he planned to bring actions against both companies. "Since January 1, a lot of friends told me that Web sites with my name had been closed. They told me it's impossible to search for my information on Google and Yahoo."
I won't pretend to be a lawyer, but it seems unlikely that Guo will be successful. He acknowledges that there's no chance in Chinese court, but it would be interesting if he succeeds in bringing a suit against the companies in U.S. court.
See The Times' full article, "Dissident Chinese professor to sue Yahoo! and Google for erasing his name." Hat tip goes to Techdirt.
Baidu, China's leading search engine, gets 7 percent of its traffic on a service that eases access to free music downloads. Google, determined to catch up after two years in what is now the second largest Internet user base on earth, may follow suit.
The Wall Street Journal describes Google's possible plans thusly: "Vivendi SA's Universal Music and about 100 other foreign and domestic record labels have been working with Top100.cn, a Beijing-based Web site that currently sells licensed music downloads for 1 yuan (about 14 cents) each, and Google. Together, Top100.cn and Google would provide free MP3 downloads with value added services, people familiar with the plans say. The new search options, for example, promise to give users free access to a database of information about their favorite artists--from concert listings to links to special ring tones."
This stands in contrast to Baidu's service, which the Journal says has led to legal disputes with record labels because illegal downloads are accessible. You get no shortage of illegal download options when you run a Baidu music search for Björk mp3s. (Sidenote: Björk herself plays Shanghai March 3.)
It will definitely be striking if Google puts legal music online. Like DVDs, CDs here are almost always illegal copies and it would take some doing to find the legal ones in many cases. Perhaps they will share ad revenue from the search pages with the record companies. Something like the ad-supported free music we hear on the radio, but available anytime and as a high-quality file...
P.S.: The Journal article includes a useful outline of the Baidu-Google competition in China.
