Google China Blog Search has changed!

Google China Blog Search has recently changed its original layout. It looks more like Google News Search now.

Above is Google Blog Search UK, it looks concise and simply. And this Google News search in the UK:

It divides all the news into different sections and displays the latest news on the page. The sections are categorised according to geography locations or interest areas.

The Google Blog Search China also adapted this style. It has several categories on the left side such as sorts, entertainment or finance. On the right side of the page, there is the hottest topics and newest blogs.

Unlike Google News Search, a user cannot customise his or her own blog search page. I hope Google will shortly add this function because a user could choose those blogs that he or she is interested in easily.   

Dedication

Let it never be said that the staff of the China office are less than 5000% dedicated when it comes to their work, as evidenced by our determination to ford floods to get to our office today!

When we arrived on the train to the station near our work this morning, this is what we were faced with.

After valiantly trying to skirt the floods, we eventually just forded through,

And when the water became too deep, we just hopped on the back of one of these... 

It was no better when we got to Red Town, where the floods went right up to our office building

Its official - China has a massive population!

We earlier mentioned that China had surpased the USA as the biggest internet users, but now it is official.  The China internet 'population' is now at 253 million, compared to the USA's 231 million.  The crazy bit is that internet penetration is only at 19% in China.

So if we are only looking at users,(and potential users) China wins hands down.  But things arent so rosy when we look at how things are going monetising all those users here.  In 2007 the total revenue for internet comapnies in China was about £3 billion, which while up 46% on the previous year fall well short of the West.  In 2007 internet revenue from advertising alone was about £10.6 billion.

OK, things are cheaper over here in China, so perhaps it is not surprising to see revenue being less.  But there is a massive hole in China for tranasctional websites.  There are a couple of good ones, but considering the size of the market there should be a whole lot more.  Maybe the infrastructure and payment methods need some ironing out, but once they are sorted I expect we will see the real boom in online over here.

China's internet population should reach 490 million by 2012.  That is more then the entire population of the USA, or 8 times the population of the UK.  And with the Chinese ¥ continuing to do well while the West is heading towards recession, maybe we will see those internet revenues reverse.

More reading can be done here & here

China SE Market Share: Baidu 64.4% Google 26.1%

It was reported by Analysys on Wednesday that Baidu had further expanded its market share, compared to Google.

In the second quarter of 2008, Baidu’s market share in China’s search world is 64.4% according to revenue, higher than 60.7% in first quarter. While Google’s market share fell from 26.8% to 26.1%.

The revenue of China search engine market was increased by 87%, compared to same period last year, up to12.3 billon Yuan (90 million Pound). The reason was that SMEs spent more on marketing.

Analysys also predicted that search request would keep rising because of the Beijing Olympics during August. This would also bring opportunities to SMEs spend more on marketing.

Yahoo’s market share kept falling from 8.3% in first quarter to 5.5% in the second quarter.

Google China’s 2008 Roadmap

At the beginning of July, Kai-fu Lee, president of Google Greater China, said that in 2008 Google China would focus heavily on products popularisation.

Mr. Lee said that the road map for Google’s Chinese-language search is still focussed on an integrated search engine.  In the past 12 months, apart from web pages, Google integrated 12 services into its search engine, including news, videos, maps and etc.  And Google plans to extend that number to 30 or 50 over the next 12 months.   By doing that, users will be able to search different formats of information with a simple search.

Only about 10% of information on the internet is not in Chinese, so it is vitally important for Google to reach their goal of making foreign-language web pages easily available to Chinese users through  translation.

The fierce competition between Google and Baidu in the Chinese search area pushes Google China to continuously improve the quality of its search results and it will also make it more user-friendly.

Firecrackers go bang!

Office opens loudly!

While we have been in China for quite a wee while now we had our offical opening today, complete with firecrackers. My first real experience of Chinese firecrackers at very close hand. And let me tell you, they are loud and long.

I don't think this photo does them justice. We managed to stop the traffic coming into the centre although a few brave souls did walk very close by. Most people though just fanned the smoke away and smiled!

Search makes life easier

An animated link was added to Google China’s homepage, linking to the lifestyle information search page, where visitors can easily search for lifestyle information, such as real estate, restaurants, jobs and public transport ticket information. 

Google China not only enhances the accessibility by adding a link on the homepage, it also combines the lifestyle information search and adds a movie search function to make it more entertaining.  What you need to do first is choose your city, and then you can search for any lifestyle information within your city.  For example, if you want to watch a movie, you can easily find the cinemas - as shown in the red boxes in the image below), and the timetable (as shown in the yellow boxes).  The map on the right top can help you easily locate your cinema of choice.  You can also have more information about the movie or add your comments by clicking the link in the blue box beside the movie poster on the top, which will go to a movie web 2.0 website.

Search engines provide us a handy way of finding the desirable information, and now they are getting more and more convenient.   Take this lifestyle information search as an example, Google combines all the information you might need when you want to, for example, watch a movie.  Search engines do make life so much easier.

Beaten by the timezone...

Today, while reading the official Google blog over my lunchbreak, something I regularly do by the way, catching up with developments within 'the Google', and I spot a beautiful story...

Google has started to crawl content that is embedded within flash. I am all excited with the prospects for SEO so  I put together a beautifully structured prosaic post only to discover that I have been beaten to it by some guy called Aidan Moore, his post was rubbish (not really but mine was better) and he only gets the spot because of his 7 hour timezone advantage.

This is most unfair because most tech people blog at night time and the folks over in china will be the first to pick them up, they will also be the first to pick up the American news of the day, this gives Tamar China an edge in the world of news but it leaves me in the dark.

How are we supposed to compete in a world of 24 timezones.

Tamar @ Zhouzhuang

Before we start our CSR work the at Yue Miao foster home, we decided to do a team outing to one of Shanghai's surrounding water towns called  Zhouzhuang.  It is about 1 1/2 hours bus ride from the centre of town and when we arrived the first thing we did was go to a restaurant.  Amy ordered some of the local specialty of pig nuckles.  I had never eaten one before but it was not what I expected - not much to look at, but very tasty.  Amy & Bing also taught us how to peel shrimp with your mouth.  Tracy's attempt pictured below:

Once inside the village it was easy to see why this is thought of as China's Venice.  It is a historic town with lots of canals running through it.  It was pretty packed with people due to it being a bank holiday weekend for the Dragon Boat festival.

We finished off with a bit of exercise on the equipment.  Speaking of exercies, the Chinese government has released the official Chinese chant for the Olympics.  We will be keeping you posted with the goings on during the China CSR week.

The Chinese Dragon Boat Festival

This Sunday is the Dragon Boat Festival in China, which is one of the significant Chinese holidays with the longest history.

There are lots of customs in China to celebrate this festival, like racing in dragon shape boats, eating the traditional snack, tzungtzu(pronounced 'zong zi' in Chinese), which is sticky rice filled in bamboo leaves.  Actually, those traditional customs attempt to rescue the patriotic poet Chu Yuan at the first place, who drowned into lake, when his country was conquered by the enemy in 277 B.C.  At that time, people rowed boat into the lake and throwing the tzungtzu into lake, so that the fish would eat rice rather than the hero poet.