MySpace China

Not quite search marketing, but foreign money is still inflating the Chinese market.  Massive advertising company WPP has bought into MySpace China.  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp allowed this site to develop almost from scratch.

Gloomy prognosis for Google China

Bloomberg has a rather gloomy article (well for Westerners) about how Western internet companies can never get to the number one spot.  (Google could tell them, if it had any sense, that number two spot is lucrative enough thank you).

Alibaba under fire over shark fins

How’s this for a clash of values?  Sharks are popular in the west.  Shark fin soup is popular in China.  Sharks need to be killed to get the fins for the soup.  Alibaba hosts plenty of sellers of shark fins.  Guess what some westerners think of that?

Starbucks and China: The forgotten dimension

The case about Starbucks leaving the forbidden city has been portrayed as a case of Chinese cultural chauvinism or pride (although why there are so many Starbucks in China is not explained). 

What is important is that a petition of 500,000 was started on the internet against a government policy. 

There’s  a similar story about a cat rescue co-ordinated over the internet, citizen activism is a real story in at least some parts of China.  This may be a sign of greater freedom, or it may be seen as a threat to the regime.

Although the internet is by no means as free as in the West, it is still free in comparison to what people imagine the Chinese internet to be.

Internet blamed for teenage pregnancies in Shanghai

Teenage pregnancy is becoming a problem in the coastal cities, as apparantly is internet dating.

It’s actually a serious issue as the anti-pornography side to Chinese internet censorship is a far more important side to the “Great Firewall of China” than many in the West credit.  This could be uncontrollable internally, although a lot of “web 2.0″ applications may suffer in the meantime as the Chinese government sees a non-political reason to crack down on social media.

Chinese internet censorship is far more a case of fears about social stability than it is about guilt over student protests.

Chinese Tourists and the West

Old but gold time again.  This time the Guardian writes about what attracts Chinese tourists to the UK, and by extension the West.

Advertising Trust - some way to go

Gord Hotchkiss of the Eye Tracking survey has something more to say (at the bottom of the article).  Depending on the way you look at it, Chinese advertisers are not trusted to the extent of American advertisers - or they are a few years behind.

Is Baidu really a case of path dependence?

The Register, like just about everyone, professes itself baffled by Google’s failure (and growing failure at that) to overtake the local favourite Baidu.  You see it’s the audience, they don’t like change.

This sadly ignores two facts.  Firstly that Google took on and conquered established rivals in America and Europe five or so years ago (remember when we all thought Ask Jeeves was intuitive?).  The second is that Baidu is also relatively new, being formed only in 1999 and becoming dominant around 2002.  It’s true that the Chinese internet population has exploded since then, but still.

We think that Baidu caters for Chinese users far more than Google does, from MP3 searches to layout.  We know that this is an heretical view, and that Google may crack Baidu - but path dependence, the theory that once you get used to something you will ignore its superior rivals, is a particularly poor theory for Baidu.

Frankly we think that anyone trying to get into the Chinese market is mad to ignore Baidu.  But we’ve said that a few times.  Maybe this is our form of path dependence.

News Pictures

An interesting article about Google’s new news search offering.  They are now offering a far more visual interface, as Baidu is putting some difference with their visual offering.  The interesting fact about this is the far more visual interface prefered by Chinese users.

SEO tips for Baidu

B2BSEOExperts give some advice on optimising for Baidu.  There are some obvious things (such as write in Simplified Chinese)  to embed internal linking and metatags like it’s 1999. 

Although we specialise in placing search advertisements on Chinese search engines, we are available to consult on SEO for the Chinese engines.