In a world that only the paranoid survive, giving up your paranoiac ideal means losing your different thoughts, and thus means losing the value of existence.
The name "Guge"
The birth of the name "Guge" means the confident Google culture didn't come to China with Dr. Kai-fu Lee. There is not rule requiring a product or company must have a corresponding Chinese name. What's the Chinese name of IBM? Is it "Guoji Shangyong Jiqi Gongsi? " How many people know about this Chinese name?
Even the Chinese name is a need, Chinese users still have to input English letters into browser's address bar. Since the name "Guge" has born for a long time, could Dr. Lee tell us whether Chinese users prefer Guge.cn/Guge.com to Google.com/Google.cn? If they really like these two domain names, why Google China still redirect them to Google.cn ?
The domain name "Google.cn"
Except Internet experts, I want to know how many people know about the domain name "Google.cn" and how many people can tell the differences between it and " Google.com". For Google.cn, the result returning by search is as "clean" as the great Baidu. However, why the primary reason is "Google is not accessible" when people choose Baidu instead of Google,
There are so many articles on http://googlechinablog.com/, unfortunately, there is no single article that tells users when Google.com is not accessible, they can use google.cn instead.
Even Google Fans have to admit that in the match of Chinese language search engines, Google's results are worse than Baidu's in average. (Google is unbiased comparing with Baidu, but it has more localization problems.) What did Google.cn do besides simply removing some results which might cause a "block"?
ditu.google.cn power by MapABC
I don't wanna talk much about this product. The only thing I want to say is: although UI of the new version of ditu.google.cn is more close to maps.google.com than previous version, it is completely an OEM product in terms of both technique and geography data, as neither of them comes from Google or Guge. Using external geography data is acceptable because of the law in China. However, using other company's map technique is unacceptable as map.google.com is the best product among all the map tools (better than Yahoo! and Live Maps). You may think that I put too much concern in technique aspect, actually however, I care about the user experience much more. But the Chinese word segmentation algorithm and the location search results in ditu. google.cn are so depressing instead of exciting.
As there are already some rivals like go2map and baidu map, to OEM such a product has nothing to do with the market share or user satisfaction. I think the only usage of this product is to show people that Guge team is working hard. But actually, the only result provided by this product is yet another evidence supporting the propaganda: "Guge doesn't understand Chinese language".
Guge is not Google
During this period, Guge is working hard proving us that a company's gene is neither the
capital composition nor the beautiful office building, it's neither the dual monitors of one computer (I have dual monitors, smiling evilly -> http://www.flickr.com/photos
Therefore, while Google's global market share is growing up, we have got a new year search market report.
According to the data gathered by new criteria, Guge's webpage search engine market share in China is less than 20% for the first time and is only about 14.9%. According to the early CNNIC and CIC reports, in 2006 Guge's market share are 25.3% and 20.6% respectively, both indicate that Guge's market share is decreasing.If these reports are reliable, then Google has got a big success in the plan of quitting China's search engine market via setting up a company named "Guge"
If you compare the saturation before Guge coming to China and after, you will find the title of the article is not that ridiculous.
This article's Chinese Version.
