

420M People In China Have Internet Access, 99% Use Baidu For Search - andre3k1
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/420m-people-in-china-have-internet-access-99-use-baidu-for-search/

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garply
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
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
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.

~~~
archgoon
>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
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.

~~~
radu_floricica
No idea why you're getting downvotted. I'm in a not-so-rich country (though
definitely not poor) and I can totally understand that some things you just
can't afford, even if they may give better value for money.

------
SkyMarshal
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.

~~~
MikeCapone
You can get an idea of what they're talking about using automated translation
tools.

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imrehg
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".

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aleksandrm
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).

------
Legion
... according to Baidu's CEO.

~~~
keyle
yeah China doesn't often inflate figures to the outside world...

------
epynonymous
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.

------
aneth
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.

~~~
glh
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.

