1 reply to this topic

[dzinerbear]

Hi all,

I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately, I've been pretty busy – swamped actually.

A buddy of mine has offered to translate a couple of my pages into Cantonese or Mandarin, and I find the prospect interesting.

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience or knowledge about the indexability of sites in either of these languages.

Thanks
Dzinerbear

[websage]

Not directly answering your question but something that might be related:

Google, Baidu, Huicong Dominate Chinese Search Engine Market

From SinoCast China IT Watch:

Big snippet as it is not available online yet:

"In the international search engine market, the wars among the giants are changing the market structure. After it purchased Overture with USD 1.68 billion, Yahoo! has launched a series of new actions. Microsoft's procurement of Google failed, but it has listed the development of search engine on schedule and plans to release new search engine in 2005. Even IBM is eyeing at the market.

In China, Sina.com just launched its new searching platform and revealed that it had signed a cooperation contract with Google, which proved the rumor that Google was looking for partner secretly to enter China.

After it got its first bucket of money, Baidu, a famous Chinese searching technology provider is planning for the initial public offering on NASDAQ. Chinese search engine market is dominated by Google, Huicong and Baidu.

A logo of "Power by Huicong" was marked on the webpage search sector of the leading Chinese portal website Sohu.com. Huicong confirmed that the two sides had signed cooperation contract. It was also reported that NetEase.com and Tom.com would also use Huicong's search engine, on which Huicong had not confirmed or denied first. And lately, the three sides announced their cooperation at the same time.

An informed person said the search engine providers' fights for portals are very fierce. Both Baidu and Huicong spare no efforts to enroll the portals. The large orders of Huicong are all signed just before the release conferences. If there is any inattention, the situation will be much different.

Before the wars, Huicong had enrolled Sina.com and Sohu.com. At the end of last year, Huicong tied up with China.org.cn and other 100 governmental websites to establish a China Searching Alliance, which has over 420 members now. At the beginning of this year, Huicong, Sina.com and China Searching Alliance started deep cooperation on fixed listing and other value added services.

Now Huicong and Google provide searching service to Sina.com. Sohu and NetEase.com uses Huicong services in part of their searching. And Tom.com uses Huicong services completely. Except the four large portals, Huicong also provide search engine service to 3721, China.com, 263.net and other websites. Huicong has replaced Baidu to become the most widely used search engine.

In order to break the encirclement of Google and Huicong, Baidu launched the listing-upon-price service in Nanjing, aiming at the small and medium sized enterprises. Although Baidu lost the fights for the large portals, and remained only 21cn.com, it is still planninig for the IPO on NASDAQ, which aroused media's attentions.

Baidu revealed that the company's performance was praised by an investment bank and it helps Baidu be listed on NASDAQ voluntarily. Analysts think that Baidu still needs to show its profitability to prove its strengths. So it may launch some large actions soon.

After the fights for portals, another focus of the search engine providers' wars will be sales channel. Sales channel is predicted to be attached more importance on. Now Huicong has tied up with over 420 major websites through China Searching Alliance. Baidu, the first Chinese search technology provider, has set up its sales channel.

Recently, Baidu alleged itself the fourth largest Chinese portal. Huicong added the functions of news, mp3 and image searching. Google has had news and image searching for a long time. Some media raised a question that if the searching websites will become new portals. Huicong CEO Chen Pei said the search engine providers will develop their products vertically and become the representative of an industry. But they will not become portals. He also thinks that Chinese search engines are still far from going to the international market. The emphasis for now is to make Chinese market larger and strengthen themselves enough to stand against the impacts from foreign rivals."