Those Mac vs. PC ads are getting a little tiresome now, so for my next cartoon I’ll rip into those two familiar characters to pit the Chinese search engine Baidu against the international search giant, Google.
There are huge regional variations in terms of which search engines and portals are favoured by which nations. The Japanese love Yahoo.co.jp for some reason that is lost on me; I gave up on Yahoo’s lameness about 5 years ago.
Whilst here in China, homegrown variations are preferred, and Baidu is the leading search engine amongst Chinese netizens. Yet, as has been well documented, Baidu is very much tailored to – ummm, how shall I say this – national interests, so you can easily spot gaping holes in what it has indexed for search, and what it has decided to overlook. The same can be said for the compromised Google.cn (nicknamed Guge), which caused a rumpus back in 2006.
Credit where it’s due, however, I really like Baidu’s Chinese-language search, which gives really good results – forget English, though – and their maps (map.baidu.com) are really neat and detailed.
Also, their MP3 search is useful, and just last week it won a court-case in Beijing that was brought by several international music labels, who contended that its “deep-linking†to pirated MP3 files constituted major copyright infringement. But apparently it’s fine. Though Yahoo had a lot less luck in an eerily similar case earlier in 2007. *cough*whatasurprise*cough*
Anyway, here’s the cartoon. Please wait a moment for all 3 images to appear, below.
With regards to Japanese people using Google, I heard that Yahoo uses some special system which works well and gets better results for Japanese searches than Google does. =)
Very fun. But in fact, in China, the cool or wow factor is more a Baidu attribute, while Google is primarily used by the more educated and white collar s. So I don’t know if your choice of characters is the right one…
BTW Google China is as censored as Baidu…:)
Thanks for yr input, Alex & China SEO company. It’s certainly true that Baidu is more down with what people want here!
Good cartoon mock-up…
Google need to get in touch with the common folks and needs again…It has lost its soul since going public…The folks at China HQ are often haughty/unfriendly…
Baidu is completely committed to grassroots needs and innovaton…That is why the latest stats show that they have 70-75% of the in-country market now…The staff at Baidu is made up of great folks and they are a pleasure to work with on anything…
Maybe in cosmopolitan HK the White-collar types prefer Google, but here it is pretty much everyone…My students,at a key university, prefer it 10-1 over Google…
I had a long meeting with the new International Director of Marketing this week and am awed by all the new developments on the horizon like the recent acquisition of Xiaonei…
Lonnie B Hodge
CEO, Culture Fish Media
Funny cartoon, telling the truth partially, but it is surely more complicate to tell the reason why baidu keep leading the Chinese searching market. But anyway, enjoy the creative idea and will trackback in my blog 😉
Thank you for this post, I’ve learned a lot more now about mp3’s. My personal place is a directory I found somwere on yahoo. It has storaged hundreds of music files. I’ve added the link in that website url option. Hope to see more posts from you!
I’m glad China is starting to loosen some of their restrictions on the internet. Now more websites are accessible.
It is just super funny.
I was thinking to make a bigger cartoon about that and I found your post. 😉
You can say a lot about Baidu, and actually you can find a lot of porn pictures on illerevant search