Written by Xisi Dai
Índice
When we think of search engines, the first brand that comes to mind par excellence is Google. And if we ask people on the street for the name of other search engines, we are likely to hear Yahoo and Bing. We all take it for granted that these are the most popular search engines; but will this be the case everywhere?
What about, for example, the Chinese? Will their Google light bulb go on when they want to make a query on the Internet?
The answer to this question is no. China is a particular case. The search engine that most Chinese users use for browsing is
Baidu
.
According to Enfodesk reports, Baidu tops the list of the most used search engines in China (78.6%), followed by Google China (14.2%), which has been headquartered in Hong Kong since 2010.
Other search engines that stand out are
Sogou
(3,6%) y
Soso
(1.4%), which despite representing a low percentage, should not be overlooked, because if we consider that there are more than 600 million Chinese Internet users, they have a considerable number of followers. It should also be noted that it is not easy to gain a foothold among such major powers as Baidu and Google.
Well, what is Baidu?
As we have said before, Baidu (百度), whose literal translation into English is “one hundred degrees” is the search engine par excellence in China, which is why we must take it into account in an international positioning campaign in that country.
It was founded in 1999 and is based in Beijing. If we browse through it we will notice that it has a similar design to Google, and that it offers us endless options (news, shopping, books, automatic translator, etc.), but through my experience as a user I can highlight some differences:
- Baidu is only in Chinese. Your page does not have any other language version.
- Baidu can search for audio files (mp3, wma, swf, etc.) and also allows the possibility of downloading them on national territory.
- Baidu has its own collaborative encyclopedia (Baidu Baike) with more than 6.2 million articles in Chinese, making it the “Wikipedia” of choice for Chinese people.
- Baidu’s automatic translator is not as powerful as Google’s and has fewer languages.
- Baidu is soon to launch an international tourism portal (Baidu Luyou), now in beta version, with very good content in Chinese.
- Baidu has its own writing input method software (for writing in Chinese).
- In China, Baidu loads faster than Google.
- Google Adwords and Adsense services are more complete and accurate than those of Baidu. In addition, Baidu has to comply with certain requirements and licenses to start an Adwords campaign.
Why hasn’t Google succeeded in China?
It’s not that Google hasn’t been successful in China, it’s just that there are some variables to consider. Since Google China moved its headquarters to Hong Kong for various reasons, searches on its site take longer to load in the Chinese territory. This, coupled with the fact that Baidu has more pages indexed in Chinese than Google, favors the Chinese public’s preference for this search engine. However, it should be noted that when Chinese users want to search for information about foreign countries, they turn to Google.
Thus, we cannot say that Google has not succeeded in China, but that it is really a matter of necessity that the Chinese public uses one search engine or another .
Tell me about the other search engines in China.
We had noted that Sougou and Soso were carving out a small niche for themselves among Chinese search engines. And we can see that in general they have a more colorful design than Baidu and more similar to Google.
Both are focused on the Chinese market, like Baidu, but have fewer products than Baidu. However, we can highlight:
- Sougou has search to find multimedia files, maps, its own collaborative encyclopedia and a proprietary software writing input method.
- Soso has its own webmaster platform.
Other search engines are also in the minority.
Youdao
only offers search for web pages, images, videos, news and its own dictionary.
Sohu
is mainly focused on offering advertisements and online games, so it has a very different design from other search engines.
Bing is also in China, but it is not very popular and Yahoo China has just closed this September, as it indicated by posting a farewell message on its website. He announced that according to an agreement closed in 2012 with the Alibaba site, Yahoo China employees were going to move to this portal.
Most used browsers in China
Yes, the truth is that I was curious and I have done a brief research on the most popular browsers used by the Chinese and the data reveals that neither Mozilla Firefox nor Google Chrome are the most popular in China.
Just as the Chinese have their own criteria when it comes to using search engines, when it comes to browsers, they are 360 安全浏览器 (24,46%), Internet Explorer 8 (18,41%) y Safari (12.8%), who are in the top positions, placing Google Chrome (6.44%) in 5th place.
As for browsers on mobile, the most widely used browser isUC浏览器(46%), under the symbol of a squirrel, followed by Baidu’s browser (16.8%) and the
QQ browser
(15,6%). Google Chrome, only 1% of Chinese Internet users use it and is second only to Opera, with 1.2% of total users.
