

Why do Chinese websites use numbers in their domain names? - gbraad
http://dashan.com/blog/culture/why-do-chinese-websites-use-numbers-in-their-domain-names/

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olalonde
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#Comb...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Combinations)
[http://www.my-new-chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html](http://www.my-new-
chinese-love.com/chinese-digitalk.html)

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mungoman
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
"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).

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trg2
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.

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techaddict009
Some one has posted the answer to this here :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076)

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

~~~
rahimnathwani
Or to '0987654321', or a series of '1's

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

