Microsoft Partners With Baidu, China's Top Search Engine 115
countertrolling writes with news that Microsoft has struck an agreement with Baidu.com, the most popular search engine in mainland China, to provide results for English-language queries. From the NY Times:
"Baidu, which dominates Chinese-language search services here with about 83 percent of the market, has been trying for years to improve its English-language search services because English searches on its site are as many as 10 million a day, the company said. Now it has a powerful partner. 'More and more people here are searching for English terms,' Kaiser Kuo, the company’s spokesman, said Monday. 'But Baidu hasn’t done a good job. So here’s a way for us to do it.' Baidu and Microsoft did not disclose terms of the agreement. But the new English-language search results will undoubtedly be censored, since Beijing maintains strict controls over Internet companies and requires those operating on the mainland to censor results the government deems dangerous or troublesome, including references to human rights issues and dissidents."
Re:In Other News... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hahaha... Google and Yahoo are your shining examples? They were the first to bow down to China. (well, you sort of have a point about Altavista. I don't suppose Obsorne Computer doesn't do much business with China either)
Google might be on the outs with China lately, but that bad blood took some while to accrue.
Re:Embrace China, Extend cash and Extinguish disse (Score:4, Interesting)
So, what exactly have you done to not support Chinese? Do you buy products that have been only made and manufactured in the US, even if its higher price? Do you own iPhone or any other known mobile phone? Does any of your product read Made in China? Instead of blaming Microsoft for doing business with Chinese, what about you taking the first step?
Yes, it is good to recognize that oneself plays a part as a cog in the machinery. As a wise man once said:
"Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! .)
Aaow!
(Yeah-Make That Change)
Gonna Make That Change . . .
Come On!
(Man In The Mirror)
You Know It!
You Know It!
You Know It!
You Know . . .
(Change . .
Make That Change. "
But, it is also unfortunately the case that us little consumers don't really run the world. You and I, individually, might be on top of things, at least a bit, using our purchasing power for good, but on the whole, the notion that consumers rule is false. Even if they technically might, we actually don't, because we buy what they tell us to buy (not you and me individually, but all of us in aggregate).
The consumerist, vote-with-your-wallet-perspective is often useful, but one should not neglect to also look at it from the perspective that maybe the rich and powerful actually are running the show. (Besides, they have very large wallets and some of them have very many guns, even).
It is convenient for the superpowers and mega-corps if we think consumers have the power. And we do. That's the ingenious bit. It's just that the rich and powerful pervert our potentially rational choices with marketing and through better access to mass communication than the little gal has.
In addition to voting with the wallet, people should, in my opinion, feel free to keep bitching on /. about the bad things the powerful countries and corporations do. Even if they can't be bothered to wean themselves completely from the convenience of the big cheap teat that is made in china, backed by tyranny and systematized greed.
Full circle: Googles "do no evil" was aimed at m$ (Score:1, Interesting)
Google pull out of China because censorship is evil, so in steps m$, the outfit Google coined their motto from originally. But wait ... m$ don't have a search engine of their own, so can the Google servers take the load from them merely throwing up a wrapper round theirs? [blogspot.com]
Re:This will kill open source in China (Score:4, Interesting)
Opensorce is pretty much a dead concept in China already. They understand copying; but, why should they give credit to another person.
Further, sharing is not a Chinese value. Why should they make it easier for another person to compete with them?
Really, I work at a university in China. they are aware of the Western Linux and Opensource thing. They just have no interest in it. They do not understand the point of it; to them, it is simply based on an alien value system.
Re:Just 10 million english searches (Score:4, Interesting)
While you are probably mostly correct about people only ever seeing the part of the net that is in their own language, I find a disproportionate number of the sites that I visit to be in English, German, and Japanese. The English part is easily explained (I'm an English speaker in an English speaking nation, who uses English services), but the German and Japanese part isn't so easy to explain. This leads me to believe that there are dominant languages on the net, English is one of the and that probably explains why Baidu wants to improve their English language results.
(To go to that cocktail party analogy, people mostly cluster according to their language but they use a dominant language when they want to talk to other clusters.)
Re:This will kill open source in China (Score:2, Interesting)
Not interested? In fact one university made a copy version of FreeBSD and claimed their own, while obtaining millons of dollars from the government.It's named QiLin, and is for defence research.They actualy baned Sourceforge for sometime with nation wide firewall just to fool the public. A company is also copying Android as we speak, it' named Ophone. Opensource was dead long ago in China, but for a different reason.