6 ms·

Why do Chinese websites use numbers in their domain names?

34 points by gbraad 12y ago

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
I suspect this is a shorter duplicate of http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-web... which was on Digg (IIRC, or maybe reddit) a couple of days ago. It was quite a good article.
mungoman 12y ago
I don't think the article solved the mystery as the Chinese are not at all unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. Chinese students learn the Latin alphabet and use them to spell words before learning Chinese characters. Chinese keyboards only consist of Latin characters. To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu.
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  "To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu." Not everyone uses a phonetic typing method. Many people use wubi (五笔) which is based on the structure of the characters. Although this still uses a QWERTY keyboard, I suspect it doesn't help make people more familiar with the roman letters (in terms of memory, or mapping letters to English sounds).
olalonde 12y ago
There's another reason: combination of numbers can be made to sound like words or sentences (e.g.: 360 = longing to see you again). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Combinations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Comb... http://www.my-new-chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html http://www.my-new-chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html
trg2 12y ago
This is interesting, but has anyone noticed that .cn URLs and Chinese .com's seem to always be a combination of ASCII roman characters and arabic numerals, rather than Chinese characters? Why is this? Is writing in pinyin and converting the URL to Chinese undesirable? On a side note, has anyone ever noticed Chinese characters in the URLs indexed by Baidu? Is Baidu even able to index URLs with non-ASCII Chinese characters? I've only ever seen roman characters in the URLS they index.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
techaddict009 12y ago
Some one has posted the answer to this here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076
kevinburke 12y ago
This property also makes wifi network passwords easy to guess - generally stores just set it to be the store's phone number.
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  Or to '0987654321', or a series of '1's

34 points by gbraad 12y ago

I suspect this is a shorter duplicate of http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-web... which was on Digg (IIRC, or maybe reddit) a couple of days ago. It was quite a good article.

mungoman 12y ago

I don't think the article solved the mystery as the Chinese are not at all unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. Chinese students learn the Latin alphabet and use them to spell words before learning Chinese characters. Chinese keyboards only consist of Latin characters. To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu.

rahimnathwani 12y ago
"To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu." Not everyone uses a phonetic typing method. Many people use wubi (五笔) which is based on the structure of the characters. Although this still uses a QWERTY keyboard, I suspect it doesn't help make people more familiar with the roman letters (in terms of memory, or mapping letters to English sounds).

olalonde 12y ago

There's another reason: combination of numbers can be made to sound like words or sentences (e.g.: 360 = longing to see you again). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Combinations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Comb... http://www.my-new-chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html http://www.my-new-chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html

trg2 12y ago

This is interesting, but has anyone noticed that .cn URLs and Chinese .com's seem to always be a combination of ASCII roman characters and arabic numerals, rather than Chinese characters? Why is this? Is writing in pinyin and converting the URL to Chinese undesirable? On a side note, has anyone ever noticed Chinese characters in the URLs indexed by Baidu? Is Baidu even able to index URLs with non-ASCII Chinese characters? I've only ever seen roman characters in the URLS they index.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

techaddict009 12y ago

Some one has posted the answer to this here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076

kevinburke 12y ago

This property also makes wifi network passwords easy to guess - generally stores just set it to be the store's phone number.

rahimnathwani 12y ago
Or to '0987654321', or a series of '1's