What has been happening in the last 2 weeks in the world of the search engines in China. Here’s the overview
Baidu Video Search, and Denied Rumors
Since the beginning of this year Baidu has it’s own video search, which is still officially in Beta. In May, they started a cooperation with Video-sharing website KU6. Youku.com has become the latest partner of Baidu. Video search results will now contain links to the Youku inventory as well.
There was a rumor published that Baidu is planning to conquer the European market. Later the rumor was denied by Baidu.
I would be surprised if they would enter Europe. They recently entered Japan and it’s not clear yet whether they have been making any inroads. Going into new territory would take up a lot of resources while there is still much to do in China.
Then again, the fact that they denied the rumor, doesn’t mean much as well.
Google Rumors and Entertainment Search
Staying with rumors. Google has denied they bought directory website 265.com, eventhough on May 31st the domain registry records showed that ownership had changed. They did admit they want to cooperate. Search on 265.com is powered by Google.
Xunlei, a company that Google invested in earlier this year, bought the domain Gougou. Gougou, which used to be a RSS reader, now serves as a search engine for mp3’s, movies, torrents and everything else that is (illegally) downloadable. Google may be involved with Gougou as well reports the CWR Blog,
“In the search result of Gougou, there’re links to Google search in the right sidebar and footbar. Also there’s Google suggest like feature in the search bar. These suggest that Google may have participated in the development of the search engine.”
This may be Google dipping its toes in the entertainment search. An area, as shown in a recent report by Intelliconsulting, that search engine users miss in Google.
Yahoo.cn Changes Interface
Yahoo.cn has changed its interface. Again the CWR Blog tells us more.
This is a universal search, which includes search result from webpage, image and blogs, etc, all in one page. There’s no next page. You can navigate to more results though tabs.
The new search engine is called OmniSearch. The name reminds me of OmniFind, but Yahoo said it’s based on OneSearch, Yahoo’s mobile search platform.
Yahoo had already mentioned at the Xiamen SES conference they wanted to adjust to more of a Web 2.0 version and this seems to be the first step. On the Yahoo.com.cn domain they still offer the Web 1.0 version.
China Internet News Snippets
MSN China’s portal opens a new dating channel
Microsoft’s Beijing Lab predicts age and gender
Baidu search engine fraud exposed
A Firefox extension to access Flickr in China
Tom Eachnet (aka Ebay China) cancels paypal service and the rumor is, it will adopt a new domain name sometime in July.
If you have been reading till this far, I commend and thank you:) Next time more Internet news from China.
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Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of Tiger Internet Marketing which provides Chinese seo services.
