User privacy concerns on Chinese social-networking sites have led the biggest players to block indexing by Baidu, China's leading search engine, according to Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting.
The blogging site of Sohu.com, China's leading portal, as well as social networking sites including 51.com, Xiaonei, and Hainei have blocked Baidu's spiders from indexing the sites, Marbridge reported. Other search engines may also be blocked.
The reasoning behind this move may reveal a pragmatic commitment to security by obscurity for people who post under their real names and may want to avoid attention from employers, acquaintances, and government monitors.
But if Sohu blogs aren't indexed, there may be radical effects on the Chinese blogosphere.
Regardless, the attempt at security is partial at best. The data, of course, is still published. Just as Americans have gradually come to terms with the fact that placing something on MySpace, Facebook, or other sites may make it accessible to prospective employers or others, data posted on Chinese portals is accessible to a variety of actors.
Even if privacy controls intended to restrict access to approved users are used, the Chinese government's power to look at data contained on servers within its borders makes government surveillance only slightly more circumscribed.
Further, search engines might simply switch to spider IPs or behaviors that get around the blocks, though this may be unlikely given that leading engines tend to obey "no spiders" signs in robots.txt.
This move may still be good for social-networking sites. But for blogs, a block can be disastrous if it isn't optional.
As those of us who blog know all too well, the success of one's work and the likelihood that anyone reads it is dependent on links. Links, links, and more links. But if someone searching for discussions of a certain topic can't find our work, we're out of luck.
For personal blogs, this is no big deal. I could care less if people index my daily musings on a personal blog. But for people who wish to participate in the vibrant world of online discourse, being obscured from search engines is a game changer.
It's unclear to me at this point whether Sohu's block will remove its blogs from the searchable world. But if it does, prepare to see a deluge of Chinese bloggers switching to different platforms.
I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China's leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).
This wouldn't bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: "Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number." A quick Google search didn't turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what's the deal guys?
The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge's name on Rick's Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an "upstart" engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu's music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)
On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge's coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell "develop" while saying "men from the east" aren't that smart.
Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there's a "next week" below that doesn't work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here's the list:
- They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
- They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent's traffic.
- They have advertising solutions that can be tailored--as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
- They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
- They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
- Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
- They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you'd only take less than 8% of their market share...
- They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don't have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me....
- They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases....
After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won't likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they're still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that's not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish's public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I'd still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I've written about.
I'd meant to note this earlier, but SEO Hong Kong posted a summary of some findings when Chinese Internet users were tested comparing China's leading search engine, Baidu, with the newer Google.cn.
In a test conducted with Chinese subjects, eye scanning on Google.cn was more focused in the upper left hand corner compared to Baidu despite the fact that both search engines have nearly identical page layouts. Baidu users also scrolled down the page more than the Google users, but clicked on less sponsored listings--less than 1 percent compared to 3 percent for Google. ...
On Baidu, less than 45 percent of all clicks took place in the first 3 organic listings. This was much less focused than Google.cn where over 70 percent of all clicks took place on the top 2 organic results alone. Baidu pages also had significantly longer reading times--an average of 55 seconds--compared to 30 seconds on Google.cn.
The blog says the test was conducted by Enquiro. This result would seem to suggest that Google, like when it's compared to other English search engines such as Yahoo, seems to get users to what they want more quickly. I'd caution, however, that there may be a complication in that the test subjects may have been more familiar with the Baidu layout and were thus more interested in culling more information from familiar locations on the page. Both sites have exceedingly clean front pages.
(Credit:
Google/Sinobyte)
I thought I'd give the two a comparative whirl with a simple search for something a Chinese user wouldn't necessarily need to search for: what is the exact date of the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year in the Gregorian calendar. The result? Google wins, giving me the date, as well as an icon indicating this is the coming year of the rat. It also links to a board for Spring Festival greetings...
(Credit:
Baidu/Sinobyte)
Baidu also links to its festival page, which gives us a history of the holiday, but it's significantly harder to find the most simple fact you might be looking for: the exact date. On the other hand, Baidu's page gives you a nice history (translated) of the holiday.
Google is also rumored to be experimenting with a more, say, cluttered home page for the Chinese market, along the lines of the leading Chinese search engine Sohu.com. I'd love to see comparisons of user experience including Sohu's Yahoo-esque portal. Yahoo itself, so far, is something of an also-ran, with a live beta online. Why it advertises that it's a beta and doesn't just launch with continual improvements the way Google has is beyond me.
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