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Google wasn't giving up too much in China. The search engine wasn't getting much tractions, based on differing asthetics. Chinese websites are far more cluster

Google wasn't giving up too much in China. The search engine wasn't getting much tractions, based on differing asthetics. Chinese websites are far more clustered and busy - take a look at https://world.taobao.com/ https://world.taobao.com/. I guess that it's being shifted - baidu seems relatively uncluttered, but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page.

Larrikin 9y ago
>but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page I suspect that the language just simply looks busy to people who aren't fluent/native, even if you know enough to actually read it. I had the same complaint in Japan, even though I could read most of it. At the same time, even in English, a large complaint on here is that most redesigns simply result in a dumbed down design with less information density.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  No, it's a completely different design aesthetic. If anything, Japanese / Chinese websites should be less cluttered because the characters can potentially convey more in lesser space. Not everything is cultural relativism.
yohui 9y ago
Baidu has long had an uncluttered, Google-like homepage, e.g. in Jan 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100101155014/http://www.baidu.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100101155014/http://www.baidu.... It's true that before its departure Google China was losing market share to Baidu, reportedly at least in part due to government throttling which slowed Google's service to a crawl: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6143553/China-Google-boss-departure-reignites-debate-over-censorship.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6143553... Still, Google China's share of the market was not negligible. The article above claimed it had only just dipped under 30%; StatCounter (accurately or not) claims Google China was still above 40% in early 2010: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/china/2010 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ch... Either way, that's a significant fraction, more than Bing has ever had in the US. Not to mention the size of the Chinese market or future growth potential (consider what Google could have done with Android in China). Google could have responded to the pressure by seeking to appease the Chinese government. Other companies have done so, many profitably. Google did not.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  for that 30% claimed market share, a large % of them had to search "google" in Baidu to get to google.com because they didn't know how to spell the word google.
lsseckman 9y ago
http://www.baidu.com/ http://www.baidu.com/ https://www.google.com/ https://www.google.com/

Larrikin 9y ago

>but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page I suspect that the language just simply looks busy to people who aren't fluent/native, even if you know enough to actually read it. I had the same complaint in Japan, even though I could read most of it. At the same time, even in English, a large complaint on here is that most redesigns simply result in a dumbed down design with less information density.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
No, it's a completely different design aesthetic. If anything, Japanese / Chinese websites should be less cluttered because the characters can potentially convey more in lesser space. Not everything is cultural relativism.

yohui 9y ago

Baidu has long had an uncluttered, Google-like homepage, e.g. in Jan 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100101155014/http://www.baidu.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100101155014/http://www.baidu.... It's true that before its departure Google China was losing market share to Baidu, reportedly at least in part due to government throttling which slowed Google's service to a crawl: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6143553/China-Google-boss-departure-reignites-debate-over-censorship.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6143553... Still, Google China's share of the market was not negligible. The article above claimed it had only just dipped under 30%; StatCounter (accurately or not) claims Google China was still above 40% in early 2010: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/china/2010 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ch... Either way, that's a significant fraction, more than Bing has ever had in the US. Not to mention the size of the Chinese market or future growth potential (consider what Google could have done with Android in China). Google could have responded to the pressure by seeking to appease the Chinese government. Other companies have done so, many profitably. Google did not.

dis-sys 9y ago
for that 30% claimed market share, a large % of them had to search "google" in Baidu to get to google.com because they didn't know how to spell the word google.

lsseckman 9y ago

http://www.baidu.com/ http://www.baidu.com/ https://www.google.com/ https://www.google.com/