Archive for the 'Search' Category

So what’s Baidu been up to?

This caught my eye when I was writing that Google post the other day, and I couldn’t resist:

Baidukids

Baidu 少儿, or Baidu Kids, is beautifully done and reflects Baidu’s understanding of the Chinese market. When I was doing fieldwork in Beijing last summer, one of the teachers we interviewed said that some Grade 1 homework assignments involved running internet searches and bringing some results to class. And there is nothing better than a safe search engine for that end. (The only problem would be convincing kids to goto the Kids site.)

The first row of links (the golden paw buttons above) are: Study English, Play Games, Science Knowledge, Child Songs, Cartoons, Parents’ Links. The first link on the top left being "Study English" again reflects an understanding, this time of the parents’ wishes.

I may be reading too much into this though, since it’s only a beta section, and their "understanding" might have come out of luck rather than strategic planning.

Go see the site for yourself.

P.S. Baidu’s also been up to other things, mainly in the converging mobile and web realms. See China Web 2.0 Review’s post about their new call-in search service (powered by real human operators).

Chinese missing persons website

I was looking for something else on Flickr, when I came across a bunch of photos posted by someone named "missing person net" 寻人网Since April 21, 2005, "missing person net" has been posting photos of missing mainland Chinese people on Flickr. 

The most recent was posted on May 28, 2007:
Missing_person_1

Na Kexin, female, 14 years old, born 1/19/94, inadvertently got lost. Home address: Heilongjiang province, Youyi County, Xinglong Town.  Distinguishing characteristics: thin, 1.7 meters tall, medium length hair, fairly goodlooking.  Contact number: 13555103059.  Family guarantees deepest thanks to those who can provide information.

After Baidu’ing the term "missing persons net" this site came up: 110 missing persons net.  It posts photos of people who others are looking for.  It also has a section called "successful cases," meaning those which have been solved, which are divided into the following categories: Left on Own Accord; Reasons Unknown; Cheated or Kidnapped (all children); Lost Way (quite a few older people); Lost Touch With Friends and Family (only 3 of these); Orphan Looking for Relatives (only 3); Urban Vagrants (3 young boys). 

These cases provide the briefest glimpses of a different world:

Name: So-and-so Liu (Liaoning)| Posted: 2006-5-8
Missing person notice: Liu So-and-so, male, age 16, Liaoning Province Benxi City, left home 9/19/04, family members posted notice on this site 5/8/06.  8/2/06 family notified this site that Liu So-and-so had returned safely home. 

Advice: Parents should communicate more with children, discover problems in a timely manner, and resolve problems in a timely manner. It is to be hoped that Internet cafes will not allow minors to enter, that work units will not employ child laborers, and that police departments will take more responsibility.

top google video: sensationalist “Rape of Nanking”

Jay Dautcher alerted me to the current number one video on Google Video.  It’s been seen over 280,000 times, almost 100,000 of those in the last 24 hours.  It’s a 77 minute video called The Rape of Nanking (Nightmare in Nanking), originally produced in English by a Dr. Rhawn Joseph and his Brainmind organization, and now voiced over in Mandarin. Dr. Joseph seems to have a fascination with the strange and macabre, and has produced such bizarre "classics" as Hitler’s Diaries, the Face and Pyramids of Mars, Alpha and Omega Antichrist, and a series of Brain Mind lectures.  You can find the English version of Nanking Nightmare in several parts on Youtube, where it has been viewed 135,000 times in the last 3 months.  The promo for the video has quotes such as this:

We had fun killing Chinese. We
caught some innocent Chinese and either buried them alive, or pushed
them into a fire, or beat them to death with clubs. When they were half
dead we pushed them into ditches and burned them, torturing them to
death. Everyone gets his entertainment this way. Its like killing dogs
and cats." –Asahi Shimbun, Japanese soldier, describing Japanese
atrocities during the Rape of Nanking.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the massacre. A quick Baidu search turns up a groundswell of attention in the last week or so for the film.  For instance, China Youth Daily editor Qiu Haiping wrote an impassioned post on his blog on Feb 22, rallying Chinese viewers to see the film and to show it to their children as well. It was immediately reposted at forums, such as here at Tianya on the same day. Some comments on the Tianya repost:

The Americans see Sino-Japanese relations warming up
so they deliberately put out this film. Bush says to Japan,
look, you’ve got so much hatred with China,
China is not going to let it go.  Just be good and let me piss on you.
That evil American government, there’s nothing they won’t think of.

The best teacher for Chinese youth’s anti-Japanese education is Japan itself! The Chinese government has actually been suppressing anti-Japanese sentiment inside China. In 2005, the explosion of anti-Japanese demonstrations was led by the Internet’s development in China.  Thanks to the Internet, which has allowed us to understand more truths, and led us to throw away those ridiculous fantasies!

Actually, those Chinese who are familiar with the Japanese atrocities all hold a strong desire for revenge, and hope that China will punish Japan for it one day. Many Chinese don’t want to see any more propaganda from Chinese officials about "Sino-Japanese friendship."  We are looking for an excuse for the second Sino-Japanese war.  The short-sightedness, bullying and shameless nature of the Japanese are an opportunity for Chinese to get revenge!…

Watch this movie not to make us remember hate, not to make us take revenge, but to make us study history, so that both countries can peacefully coexist.

No matter what the U.S. does, they’re still different from Japan because they are still human.  The Japanese will always be beasts.

dot cn dot com: google, look out!

Jay Dautcher writes: I typed http://www.google.cn.com/ into the URL by accident, check out what
you get - Shenzhen call girls!

GooglecncomGooglecncom2

Baidu’s most popular questions of 2006

Check out Baidu Zhidao/Baidu Knows Knowledge’s 2006 top ten questions list.  They’ve divided it into four different kinds of questions and provided access to the most commonly asked questions as well as their answers.  If you care to browse in Chinese, all the answers are rated by readers and commented upon.  Here is a very rough translation of the top 10 questions, and some of the text around them on Baidu.  Kind of hard to translate, for some reason.

Each year’s Zeitgeist ranking contains questions about the unknown. The individual seems so tiny when compared with the huge, complicated world.  All that is unsolvable and confusing can be turned into a series of questions that many people would rather bring to a search engine than communicate with a real person…

As for the 4 different kinds of questions asked here, "why" is looking for reasons, "how" is searching for a method to do something, "what" is looking for definitions, "should I" is looking for the answer to a choice.

What is search?  One word: looking for “找”.  Looking for the answer to questions, is search.  Getting on a search engine to search the answer to questions is also looking for. But one can always try Baidu Knowledge Zhidao/Baidu Knows 百度知道.  These common questions show up with great frequency and have all sorts of answers. The way to look for them is simple: type out your question, hit Enter.

Top 10 "Why" 为什么 questions:

1.  Why did they go on the Long March?
2. Why are we alive?
3. Why do we need to drink water?
4. Why can’t I open this page/link?
5. Why does my hair fall out?
6. Why can’t I get online?
7. Why do we love? (misleading: it’s part of a song title, "Why can’t lovers be together?")
8. Why study?
9. Why take part in exams?
10. Why get married? 

Top Ten "How" 如何 questions:

1. How to lose weight?
2.  How to reset a system?
3. How to make money?
4. How to get pregnant?
5. How to build a harmonious society?
6. How to innovate start a business 创业?
7. How to put on make-up?
8. How to kiss?
9. How to trade stocks?
10. How to get plastic surgery?

Top 10 "What Is" 什么是 Questions:

1. What is love?
2. What is the Long March spirit?
3. What is a blog?
4. What is dual-core?
5. What is 3G?
6. What is harmonious society?
7. What are futures? (stocks)
8. What is a trojan horse? (software)
9. What is happiness?
10. What is an ecosystem?

Top 10 "Should I" 要不要 Questions:

1. Should I read the classics?
2. Should I continue living? (title to a song)
3. Should a computer write? (?) Should people with computers keep writing characters by hand?
4. Should I take part in exams?
5. Should I join the Party?
6. Should I have a child?
7. Should we abolish the death penalty?
8. Should I see an Internet friend in person?
9. Should I get married?
10. Should I buy a house?

Google Books + Chinese materials

K.M. Lawson at the multi-author China history blog Frog in a Well, provides a detailed tutorial on how to use Google Books to find open source historical material about China, and how to download texts in pdf format. Google Books allows you to do full-text searches of the books that are indexed already by Google, and apparently, to download some of those texts as well. 

Some examples of books that can be downloaded completely, just by searching for those with China in the title:
Odes to Kien Long: The Present Emperor of China; with The Quakers, a Tale; To a Fly, Drowned in a…
By Peter Pindar 1792

A Wayfarer in China: Impressions of a Trip Across West China and Mongolia
By Elizabeth Kimball Kendall 1913

The People of China: Their Country, History, Life, Ideas, and Relations with the Foreigner
By J. W. (John William) Robertson Scott 1900

Opium-smoking in America and China
By H. H. (Harry Hubbell) Kane 1882

Chinese spambot?

I see one way the blogspam is done from China:

Spam

Google’s new digs in Beijing

Want to know what Google looks like in China?  The company moved into their own building in the Qinghua Science Park in northwest Beijing last week, as documented on Flickr by Hong Bo, or Keso, founder and editor of China’s wellknown IT community Donews; and by blogger and cultural commentator Flypig. The photos kind of say it all.  It’s a vibrant bunch of people who are pretty happy to where they are…and who get treated really, really well with the expectation that they’ll perform superlatively. Google China looks like it has done a great job of importing all the elements
of an environment that supports creative work at Google US.  It’s the other stuff that’s the hardest, of course: Building a new kind of mainland Chinese creativity and ingenuity, one that extends beyond the Silicon-Valley-esque products and practices coming from Google headquarters and produces real value in the Chinese context.

Here’s Keso looking like a geek rock star, which he kind of is:
Google_keso

Li Kaifu greets the ceremonial dragon:

Google_dragon

They do things that "Googlers" do (Google + ren, or 人, the Mandarin word for "person", = Googler).
play fussball

Google_fussball

get massaged

Massage_google_1

worship superheroes

Google_superman

The coolest t-shirt of the week…

Google_tshirt_2

Keso points out in his blog post that despite not having any officially "Chinese" design elements, Googlers themselves provided some of their own such as red lanterns, propaganda posters, and calligraphic renderings of the character for "search". 
 

A peek inside Google’s China HQ

Neatease gives us a peek inside Google’s Beijing office:

20060813_google1

20060813_google2

Via PostShow.

User-generated Q&A in Virtual China

Iask

I’ve been trying to understand more about both new features and competition in the Chinese search engines market–with an eye toward having something to say about where innovation is happening and how ideas are flowing from one online space to another.  (Tip: if you’re interested in search, you have to visit Webmaster World.com’s excitingly useful Asia Pacific Search Engine Forum).

Let’s take a quick look at two social search features: sites where users share questions and answers with one another.

Baidu Knows "百度知道" formally launched in November 2005, was dubbed "brain searching" by Baidu CEO.  It’s similar to Yahoo! Answers, where users post and answer questions to build a knowledge base that is better than a traditional search engine. (At Webmaster World.com, Grendel Khan TSU notes that Yahoo! Answers is itself based on Naver’s Knowledge Search service in Korea).

China’s largest portal, Sina, capitalized on its massive community of users with its 2005 launch of “爱问iAsk”, which in addition to its Q&A site, can also search the web, news, images, music, video, local
content for over 50 Chinese cities, and an online encyclopedia.

An interesting difference between iAsk’s Q&A site (found here) and Yahoo! Answers, says my IFTF colleague Mike Love, is that iAsk allows users to decide how many points a question is worth to them rather than have the point scale pre-determined by the system.  Both systems reward users with points for answering questions (an incentive for participation) and deduct points for asking questions.  By letting users decide their own point value, users create something closer to a knowledge market. Which questions are really critical?  Recent 100 point questions included: a) How can I find a cheaper way to make stock trades online?; b) Should I ask for my official CCP dossier from my school now that I’ve graduated?; c) Is it possible to review the actual results of the civil service exam, having failed it?

These sites are a rich form of data about what kind of knowledge people are seeking online. 

link to Donews article on Baidu Knows and iAsk (Chinese)