5 ms·

420M People In China Have Internet Access, 99% Use Baidu For Search

33 points by andre3k1 16y ago

garply 16y ago
I find that it's broken down a lot by education / social class. The white-collar workers are more likely to use Google than the bulk of the population, which certainly uses Baidu by default. That said, when Google pulled out, a lot of my Chinese friends also switched to Baidu. It's totally understandable why: Google China sucks. It's slow and plagued by connection resets and random outages. Also, it's painful to use as an English speaker. The default locale keeps switching back to Chinese, regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. Google refuses to remember that I want English search results. It really sucks to Google for "Java API" and to have the first search page full of Chinese forum pages where the only English is "Java API" and Oracle's official API docs maybe on page 2. Using a VPN is too slow to merit use instead of Bing. So I've given up, I now Bing all day. Regarding the reason: Google didn't lose because it's a foreign company, it lost because it refused to understand the market. KFC, GE, Apple, and tons of other American companies clean up in China. Google lost because it wouldn't play ball.
- Charuru 16y ago
  I'm not sure how accurate this is. But the Chinese government cares much more about information, and the transmission of information than retail food or luxury electronics. The government interferes in all industries, but especially in areas they consider to be fundamental infrastructure, and search rightly falls into this category. Many of the problems you talk about (slow, connection resets, etc) are caused by the great firewall. You really think Google don't know how to keep good uptime or know how important speed is? As for the 'forget english' problem, do you have cookies turned on? Anyway for Chinese users the chinese forums are probably more useful than the official Oracle docs in terms of java api.
  - garply 16y ago
    First, about the language issue: Cookies are on, I'm logged into my account, and Interface Language and Search Language are both set to English only. Without ever closing my browser or logging out, within 10 or 20 minutes Google will revert to Chinese. I realize the other problems I'm talking about are caused by the firewall. But that's because Google has not complied with mainland laws or Chinese business culture. Google's poor performance is still Google's fault at core. Had they brought their tech into China and then taken their American hands off and let mainland Chinese (or Taiwanese, who are also adept at the mainland market) businessmen manage their branch as they saw fit, they would've done fine. The government wouldn't have disrupted them if they had focused on maintaining good government relations. A big part of the reason KFC crushes McDonalds here (it has 4x the number of stores if I recall correctly) is that KFC China was put into the hands of Taiwanese who created localized products and degraded quality and sanitation for the sake of price and fast growth. The American McDonald's managers wanted Chinese McDs to be just like the ones all over the rest of the world - including the same hygiene standards. McDonalds have "A" sanitation ratings where KFCs have "B"s, but it cost them the market. Incidentally, I switched over to English when I started writing this post and it's already switched back now that I'm at the end.
    - siculars 16y ago
      I'm imagine that within 10 or 20 minutes the great firewall is nixing your cookies and rewriting your request en-route to google. The legion of internet monitors have an easier time reading your search results in chinese rather than english.
    - archgoon 16y ago
      >A big part of the reason KFC crushes McDonalds here (it has 4x the number of stores if I recall correctly) is that KFC China was put into the hands of Taiwanese who created localized products and degraded quality and sanitation for the sake of price and fast growth. When you put it that way, I can't imagine why Google didn't 'want to play ball'.
      - garply 16y ago
        But cheap and low quality is what the mass Chinese market needs for now. The average Chinese does not have the money of an average American and thus does not value or is unable to pay for the quality of an American-style product. I'll give you more examples: the plugs for my electronic items never fit snugly into the wall socket, they're either too loose or need to be jammed in. Why? Because it costs more to make the plugs precise. Nobody sells electronic products with better-fitting plugs because nobody would buy them ("What, you expect me to spend more money just so that it's easier to plug in my toaster? Get real."). And Walmart is for the upper-middle class here.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    The language bit really is a problem. I'm in a German speaking country and I just can't make google understand to stop giving me German results. The frustrating thing is that it's so simple to fix this. I use language preferences. If you see that the language preference is set to something not normal for the area, believe it! And if the user does something to change language offer them a tip on how to make it work automatically.
- BCM43 16y ago
  Does DuckDuckGo work in china?
  - garply 16y ago
    It's getting a bunch of connection resets. Strange, I doubt it's large enough to be on the Chinese censors' radar. I bet it's triggering stuff aimed at sites that basically scrape or iframe Google.
- wisty 16y ago
  Also, keep in mind that Baidu has a good founder. Robin Li co-discovered Pagerank (or something similar) a little before the Google guys did. Then he went to China, and worked on cornering the market (after a few false starts). It's not like Baidu is just a cheap ripoff, they presumably know what they are doing.
aneth 16y ago
Google is losing China because the Chinese government will do whatever it takes to make sure domestic companies win in the long run. They will throttle bandwidth, block IPs, subsidize, threaten, deny permits, and use any other levers of power - subtly but effectively - until Chinese companies dominate the domestic market. Baidu does a great job, but these reasons that Google "was not close enough" are a smokescreen for what's really going on there.
- spdy 16y ago
  Why is google losing china? They own a piece of Baidu and they still operate a business in mainland china. To me it looks like they are in a wait and see mode right now. You cant win in china because you are big in the world and the same goes the other way. I dont see myself using Baidu as my main search engine.
- glh 16y ago
  Another technique China uses is to allow foreign corporations access, provided that they produce the goods and services sold to Chinese citizens domestically in China. Take, for example, American car companies which do brisk business in China. The brands are popular and American, but the cars themselves are all Made in China. China wins, American corporations win, only the American people lose. China is engaging in naked mercantilism, artificially depressing their currency to maintain a trade surplus, enacting tariffs and other protectionist measures to limit imports and foreign access to domestic markets, and trying to secure a monopoly on natural resources with the aim of waging economic warfare against other nations, as they demonstrated recently with their decision to halt exports of rare-earth minerals to Japan over a minor territorial dispute. This is far worse even than what we've come to expect from our supposed allies in Europe who routinely slap 15+% VATs on our exports and selectively enforce regulations to target mergers and acquisitions by American companies. I hope the policy makers who kept telling us that China would liberalize and become a responsible power as it developed are satisfied with the situation they helped to create. I doubt they'll be the ones to have pay the price for it.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
420M people all talking about things on the Internet, and I have no idea what they're talking about since I don't know Chinese. And I suspect the majority of them have no idea what the English Internet is talking about either. Even though it was obvious this would be the state of things one day, I still find it somewhat disconcerting that I can't use the Internet to develop an understanding of what such a consequential demographic of the human race are thinking and perceiving. Such a massive problem, and I hope to live to see the day when it is solved, and ML/NLP provides truly reliable, accurate translation across such disparate languages.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  But are all 420M people saying things worth hearing? Of the 300M people in the USA, I haven't found a whole ton of it is worth reading!
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  You can get an idea of what they're talking about using automated translation tools.
Legion 16y ago
... according to Baidu's CEO.
- keyle 16y ago
  yeah China doesn't often inflate figures to the outside world...
imrehg 16y ago
That "99%" does not mean that the rest of the search engines share 1% - people use different search engines for different types of queries. As some commenters pointed out on previous days' news submissions: "if you want to find music/videos, go to Baidu, if you want to find foreign information, go to Google".
aleksandrm 16y ago
Fun Fact: Baidu not only imitates Google in its simplistic design, but also in Server HTTP header, which reports: BWS/1.0, as opposed to Google's GWS (I believe before it was GWS/1.0).
epynonymous 16y ago
regarding the 420M number, i believe that the number is actually higher than that because there's a large population of internet cafe users that are hard to count. what's even more amazing, imho, is the number of mobile users: 600M+. all foreign internet companies have failed in china (meaning they did not take a majority of the market): ebay, paypal, google, twitter, facebook, yahoo, youtube, etc. it is definitely protectionism. the copy cat companies make a fortune in china, no comment on who that benefits mostly.

33 points by andre3k1 16y ago

I find that it's broken down a lot by education / social class. The white-collar workers are more likely to use Google than the bulk of the population, which certainly uses Baidu by default. That said, when Google pulled out, a lot of my Chinese friends also switched to Baidu. It's totally understandable why: Google China sucks. It's slow and plagued by connection resets and random outages. Also, it's painful to use as an English speaker. The default locale keeps switching back to Chinese, regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. Google refuses to remember that I want English search results. It really sucks to Google for "Java API" and to have the first search page full of Chinese forum pages where the only English is "Java API" and Oracle's official API docs maybe on page 2. Using a VPN is too slow to merit use instead of Bing. So I've given up, I now Bing all day. Regarding the reason: Google didn't lose because it's a foreign company, it lost because it refused to understand the market. KFC, GE, Apple, and tons of other American companies clean up in China. Google lost because it wouldn't play ball.

Charuru 16y ago
I'm not sure how accurate this is. But the Chinese government cares much more about information, and the transmission of information than retail food or luxury electronics. The government interferes in all industries, but especially in areas they consider to be fundamental infrastructure, and search rightly falls into this category. Many of the problems you talk about (slow, connection resets, etc) are caused by the great firewall. You really think Google don't know how to keep good uptime or know how important speed is? As for the 'forget english' problem, do you have cookies turned on? Anyway for Chinese users the chinese forums are probably more useful than the official Oracle docs in terms of java api.
- garply 16y ago
  First, about the language issue: Cookies are on, I'm logged into my account, and Interface Language and Search Language are both set to English only. Without ever closing my browser or logging out, within 10 or 20 minutes Google will revert to Chinese. I realize the other problems I'm talking about are caused by the firewall. But that's because Google has not complied with mainland laws or Chinese business culture. Google's poor performance is still Google's fault at core. Had they brought their tech into China and then taken their American hands off and let mainland Chinese (or Taiwanese, who are also adept at the mainland market) businessmen manage their branch as they saw fit, they would've done fine. The government wouldn't have disrupted them if they had focused on maintaining good government relations. A big part of the reason KFC crushes McDonalds here (it has 4x the number of stores if I recall correctly) is that KFC China was put into the hands of Taiwanese who created localized products and degraded quality and sanitation for the sake of price and fast growth. The American McDonald's managers wanted Chinese McDs to be just like the ones all over the rest of the world - including the same hygiene standards. McDonalds have "A" sanitation ratings where KFCs have "B"s, but it cost them the market. Incidentally, I switched over to English when I started writing this post and it's already switched back now that I'm at the end.
  - siculars 16y ago
    I'm imagine that within 10 or 20 minutes the great firewall is nixing your cookies and rewriting your request en-route to google. The legion of internet monitors have an easier time reading your search results in chinese rather than english.
  - archgoon 16y ago
    >A big part of the reason KFC crushes McDonalds here (it has 4x the number of stores if I recall correctly) is that KFC China was put into the hands of Taiwanese who created localized products and degraded quality and sanitation for the sake of price and fast growth. When you put it that way, I can't imagine why Google didn't 'want to play ball'.
    - garply 16y ago
      But cheap and low quality is what the mass Chinese market needs for now. The average Chinese does not have the money of an average American and thus does not value or is unable to pay for the quality of an American-style product. I'll give you more examples: the plugs for my electronic items never fit snugly into the wall socket, they're either too loose or need to be jammed in. Why? Because it costs more to make the plugs precise. Nobody sells electronic products with better-fitting plugs because nobody would buy them ("What, you expect me to spend more money just so that it's easier to plug in my toaster? Get real."). And Walmart is for the upper-middle class here.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  The language bit really is a problem. I'm in a German speaking country and I just can't make google understand to stop giving me German results. The frustrating thing is that it's so simple to fix this. I use language preferences. If you see that the language preference is set to something not normal for the area, believe it! And if the user does something to change language offer them a tip on how to make it work automatically.
BCM43 16y ago
Does DuckDuckGo work in china?
- garply 16y ago
  It's getting a bunch of connection resets. Strange, I doubt it's large enough to be on the Chinese censors' radar. I bet it's triggering stuff aimed at sites that basically scrape or iframe Google.
wisty 16y ago
Also, keep in mind that Baidu has a good founder. Robin Li co-discovered Pagerank (or something similar) a little before the Google guys did. Then he went to China, and worked on cornering the market (after a few false starts). It's not like Baidu is just a cheap ripoff, they presumably know what they are doing.

aneth 16y ago

Google is losing China because the Chinese government will do whatever it takes to make sure domestic companies win in the long run. They will throttle bandwidth, block IPs, subsidize, threaten, deny permits, and use any other levers of power - subtly but effectively - until Chinese companies dominate the domestic market. Baidu does a great job, but these reasons that Google "was not close enough" are a smokescreen for what's really going on there.

spdy 16y ago
Why is google losing china? They own a piece of Baidu and they still operate a business in mainland china. To me it looks like they are in a wait and see mode right now. You cant win in china because you are big in the world and the same goes the other way. I dont see myself using Baidu as my main search engine.
glh 16y ago
Another technique China uses is to allow foreign corporations access, provided that they produce the goods and services sold to Chinese citizens domestically in China. Take, for example, American car companies which do brisk business in China. The brands are popular and American, but the cars themselves are all Made in China. China wins, American corporations win, only the American people lose. China is engaging in naked mercantilism, artificially depressing their currency to maintain a trade surplus, enacting tariffs and other protectionist measures to limit imports and foreign access to domestic markets, and trying to secure a monopoly on natural resources with the aim of waging economic warfare against other nations, as they demonstrated recently with their decision to halt exports of rare-earth minerals to Japan over a minor territorial dispute. This is far worse even than what we've come to expect from our supposed allies in Europe who routinely slap 15+% VATs on our exports and selectively enforce regulations to target mergers and acquisitions by American companies. I hope the policy makers who kept telling us that China would liberalize and become a responsible power as it developed are satisfied with the situation they helped to create. I doubt they'll be the ones to have pay the price for it.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

420M people all talking about things on the Internet, and I have no idea what they're talking about since I don't know Chinese. And I suspect the majority of them have no idea what the English Internet is talking about either. Even though it was obvious this would be the state of things one day, I still find it somewhat disconcerting that I can't use the Internet to develop an understanding of what such a consequential demographic of the human race are thinking and perceiving. Such a massive problem, and I hope to live to see the day when it is solved, and ML/NLP provides truly reliable, accurate translation across such disparate languages.

sliverstorm 16y ago
But are all 420M people saying things worth hearing? Of the 300M people in the USA, I haven't found a whole ton of it is worth reading!
MikeCapone 16y ago
You can get an idea of what they're talking about using automated translation tools.

Legion 16y ago

... according to Baidu's CEO.

keyle 16y ago
yeah China doesn't often inflate figures to the outside world...

imrehg 16y ago

That "99%" does not mean that the rest of the search engines share 1% - people use different search engines for different types of queries. As some commenters pointed out on previous days' news submissions: "if you want to find music/videos, go to Baidu, if you want to find foreign information, go to Google".

aleksandrm 16y ago

Fun Fact: Baidu not only imitates Google in its simplistic design, but also in Server HTTP header, which reports: BWS/1.0, as opposed to Google's GWS (I believe before it was GWS/1.0).

epynonymous 16y ago

regarding the 420M number, i believe that the number is actually higher than that because there's a large population of internet cafe users that are hard to count. what's even more amazing, imho, is the number of mobile users: 600M+. all foreign internet companies have failed in china (meaning they did not take a majority of the market): ebay, paypal, google, twitter, facebook, yahoo, youtube, etc. it is definitely protectionism. the copy cat companies make a fortune in china, no comment on who that benefits mostly.