Baidu Entering Japanese Market
According to the WSJ [sub req], Baidu today will announce that they plan to enter the Japanese market in 2007:
"We carefully studied the Japanese market," said Mr. Li, who is also Baidu's chairman. "It's primarily dominated by two players we are very familiar with. We think we can do better." ... Baidu feels it will have an advantage because the Japanese written language is based on Chinese characters.
- Y! MyWeb
Sorry just had to laugh,,
Always thought a Mr. Li or "Lee" would have been behind a huge success in there respected market. Real pity that us non Chinese and Japanese speakers would never get the chance to have an in-depth look at there algorithm in there character sets.
Maybe someone that does can comment on it for us un-worldly type.
I was amazed by the money
I was amazed by the money you see everywhere in Japan when I was there last year. Frankly I know nothing about the net there apart from everyone has TV and 3G on their phones whilst going to work. I can imagine there is huge amounts of money to be made there because of the size and wealth of the market. Anyone want to do a joint venture let me know;)
Non-English speaking countries.. is where it's at
I remember when Matt Cutts said he wanted to do more on International spam on there search engine. Times like these it would be great if you could speak chinese, japanese, german, dutch etc, can you just imagine how much potential audience you could have when you think outside of the box.
Anyway off to take those chinese lessons. :)
China Invading Japan
How is that for a twist?
Baidu Algo
Oh c'mon the algo is real easy to figure out baidu_index - communist_party_list_of_banned_sites, then ordered by preferred_communist_party_sites. :P
Japanese market
Baidu may have plans to come to Japan, but it's a tough nut to crack. Google Japan can't even break the stranglehold Yahoo Japan has on the market. Google is merely #2 in Japan, as they are in China. Unless Baidu come up with some phenomenal new technology I'm afraid that they're going to be struggling here.
Being #1 in China may not necessarily work in Baidu's favor. The Japanese and Chinese haven't been on very good terms of late...