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The other countries you mentioned doesn't have anything like the great firewall of China. Google etc failed in China because the content you have left once you

The other countries you mentioned doesn't have anything like the great firewall of China. Google etc failed in China because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits, that isn't the case in the other countries you talked about. In order to compete at all they would need to redo their algorithm and service from the ground up to fit the Chinese internet because they ban so much that you can't reuse what you did for the rest. For example, the only countries that bans the entirety of Wikipedia is China and Myanmar, and China has done that much longer. The scale and severity of Chinas censorship is on a whole different level from any other country. Russia censors a few wikipedia pages, China just bans the entire thing, those two are nowhere close and one is much harder to deal with. The other countries that banned wikipedia did so for only a limited period of time or just a small subset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia

jpgvm 3y ago
> because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits You mean non-Chinese content? Chinese users aren't interested in non-Chinese content by and large. English literacy is better now than it was when Google pulled out and it's still pretty bad. Dealing with the censorship is trivial. The problem was they couldn't compete on merits and got absolutely dunked by Baidu on search and maps (though there is a ton of competition in maps these days, namely Amap and Gaode Map but it was true when Google pulled out). Primarily because of localisation (because it's natively Chinese) and also because Baidu looks and works like the rest of the Chinese web. For similar reasons Yahoo is still huge in Japan. It looks and feels Japanese. Google does not. I really reject the idea that Google failed because of censorship. All of their Chinese competitors had the same restrictions and came out on top is all.

jpgvm 3y ago

> because the content you have left once you removed all the sites China bans didn't have many useful hits You mean non-Chinese content? Chinese users aren't interested in non-Chinese content by and large. English literacy is better now than it was when Google pulled out and it's still pretty bad. Dealing with the censorship is trivial. The problem was they couldn't compete on merits and got absolutely dunked by Baidu on search and maps (though there is a ton of competition in maps these days, namely Amap and Gaode Map but it was true when Google pulled out). Primarily because of localisation (because it's natively Chinese) and also because Baidu looks and works like the rest of the Chinese web. For similar reasons Yahoo is still huge in Japan. It looks and feels Japanese. Google does not. I really reject the idea that Google failed because of censorship. All of their Chinese competitors had the same restrictions and came out on top is all.