REKURSIVE BLOG

Baidu zeitgeist / hot search trends – some interesting observations

Baidu is currently the most popular search engine in China. Many of their products and services are similar to Google. Like Google, they also have a zeitgeist / search trends service which shows the current top search queries. It’s interesting to see what people are searching for in the Chinese Internet -

The #1 fastest rising search phrase is “什锦八宝饭”: It is literally the name of a sweet, glutinous rice dish in China. However, entering this phrase into Baidu’s image search reveals its true meaning – plenty of pictures of President Hu and Premier Wen appear! Apparently, this phrase is currently used to describe fans of these two Chinese leaders. The #2 and #3 top rising queries are:

• “Pangu Plaza”: a high-end apartment residence next to the Olympics Stadiums where Bill Gates is rumored to be staying
• “Jinan Torch Relay Live Broadcast”: the Olympic torch relay recently passed through this city

The top 5 search queries are:

1. qq - the most popular Chinese instant messaging application
2. You Ku – a video sharing site, like YouTube
3. Tu Dou Wang – another video sharing site
4. Xun Lei – a BitTorrent downloading / file sharing client
5. Chi Bi – a popular Chinese movie that’s currently in the theatres

They also have top ten lists for beautiful women (Baidu image search currently shows several nude pictures of the top ranked lady - odd, I thought such pictures are censored), television dramas, games, movies, books, famous people, universities, cars (the top 5 are: Chery QQ, Mazda 6, Honda Fit, Honda Civic, Roewe 550), tourist attractions, etc.

Facebook and its “clones” studiVZ and Xiaonei

It’s interesting to hear that Facebook is suing the German social networking site studiVZ for “cloning” them. Surely Facebook must be aware of China’s Xiaonei.com, which many people say bears an even closer resemblance to Facebook? Besides shouldn’t be Facebook be much more concerned about social networking sites in China - the country with the largest number of Internet users? I guess some possibilities as to what’s going on are:

• Facebook and Xiaonei are negotiating some sort of agreement/settlement, thus avoiding a lawsuit
• Facebook is preparing to take legal action against Xiaonei, however it’s taking more time because of Facebook’s unfamiliarity with the Chinese legal system
• Facebook is still trying to figure out what to do, because they know Facebook might get blocked in China if they ruffle the wrong feathers by suing Xiaonei. Perhaps it is no coincidence that access to Facebook from within China has been choppy for the past few weeks.

Here is a screenshot of Xiaonei.com - you can judge for yourself how closely it may or may not resemble Facebook (click on the image for a larger view):

China dot coms and their US counterparts

The Chinese Internet and the US Internet are like parallel universes – for every successful dot com in China or the US, there is usually a similar dot com (often separately owned and managed) based in the other country.

Sometimes these dot coms are even clones (exact look-a-likes) of each other. For example check out this side by side comparison of twitter.com and komoo.cn.

twitter.com

komoo.cn

I’ve compiled a list of similar China and US dot coms in the table below. Let me know if you know of other major dot coms and I’ll add it to the list!