Article on Baidu

Pretty interesting stuff

[JerryOdom]

Baudi Search Engine is No. 1 in China [detnews.com]

Some fairly interesting statements concerning Chinese users. I'm kind of curious about some of this data.

Users in China have long complained that Google's search engine breaks down often and that has caused them to switch to Baidu and other Chinese search services.

What causes the problems?

when a Baidu user searches for something in Chinese, a new window pops up -- unlike Google's search function.

"This is something Chinese users like,"

Wow. In the USA pops are seriously looked down upon. Many users don't even like them when they're just part of a legit system. Yet they seem to work for the Chinese. Do they not experience the same agressive pops we do?

[bill]

What causes the problems?

I'm not sure what they're referring to here. Maybe the fact that the Chinese government filtered out Google several times in the past? Google hosts and does business from outside China, until recently. That could cause access issues. Several of our members in China have reported that sites hosted outside China can be significantly slower.

pop ups

Site design preferences in Asia lean toward what might be considered gaudy in the West. Bright colors, animated icons and lots of movement convey a different image to the user in China than they might in the US. I haven't heard this particular factoid before, but I wouldn't dismiss it either.

[larryhatch]

I get some Chinese traffic though none of my pages are in Chinese,
mostly English, a few in French and Spanish.

2 or 3 Chinese search engines refer traffic besides Google, a surprise in itself.
In the access_logs, more often than not, I see the condition: &newwindow=1

I don't see that so much in American and European traffic.

I began to wonder if the Chinese like to have two windows open, English and Chinese at the same time.
Maybe they look back and forth trying to make sense out of those awful machine translations.
That would make perfect sense to me. -Larry

[JerryOdom]

Google's search engine breaks down

This is the exact part of the statement that caught my eye. I was just wondering if it was because of slow response timeout, filtering or some other reason? I'm hoping some people with chinese experience might express their point of view?

[guoqi]

>>I began to wonder if the Chinese like to have two windows open

hum...when I was in China, very often I see people using very special browser. It is still IE but with many add ons.

For example the modified version from qq.com make it much comfortable to open and navigate to a new window.