Google by the Numbers: Just How Massive is Google, anyway?
NileshBabu |
Visually delight stuff & some research in between |
I came across this interesting article "Where Google Loses" at Foreign Policy. Here's some highlights that caught my attention
The Beijing-based search engine (Baidu - whose name means "hundreds of times," after a line in an 800-year-old poem) maintains an astounding 70 percent market share. California-based Google trails far behind, with only about 25 percent.
Baidu's net income is increasing wildly: 40 percent year-on-year, compared with 18 percent for Google. Every indication points to fast growth and lucrative profit.
a search for "Tiananmen June 4" written in Chinese characters yields 915,000 results on Google China. It gets just 11,300 results, 99 percent less, on Baidu. Type in "harmonious society," a government catchphrase, and Google gets just over 10 million results. Baidu gets 18 million.
Baidu and goverment on the same page:
Chinese authorities temporarily blocked Google because it allowed through some pornographic search results. But many of these same results were also available on Baidu
Baidu connects users with sites through which they can illegally obtain music. It also allows users to search directly for and illicitly download MP3s.
In 2005, several U.S.-based music companies sued Baidu, but inexplicably lost. In 2006, they sued Yahoo China, an American-based company, and won. (The verdicts were released on the same day.)
The government allowed Baidu to operate its illegal music search just long enough to attract a huge user base
Looks like Baidu is too powerful to fail
Baidu's entire business strategy is tailored to Chinese governmental, legal, business, and social culture -- and that is what has set it apart from Google.
The combination of a great market strategy and government favoritism means that Baidu will likely not fall from the top.
Google might dominate almost everywhere else, but in China, Baidu is set to stay king.
When the government is backing you up, you are too powerful to fail. Continue reading here.
I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.
We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."
Fascinating read on evolution of writing / communication + impact & embracing the changes.
Excellent speech - Obama always get the right message out - full of motivations, excellent examples - using example of common people etc; little bit of his history - amazing President.
Between blogging and microblogging
