Search Engines provide uniformly awful coverage of tech innovation in China
Feb 17th, 2008 by trevelyan
I’ve always been reluctant to promote Adso elsewhere. This is partly out of Canadian-bred modesty (枪打出头鸟), and partly out of the feeling that worthwhile projects shouldn’t have to justify themselves. But it isn’t ideal for attracting attention is one of the reasons I’ve started to blog again.
The major impetus is that people keep stumbling onto us after years of studying Chinese and asking why we weren’t around earlier (we were!). But it’s a legitimate grievance that good online content is getting progressively difficult to find. I personally blame the combination of AdSense and AdSense-powered SEO wunderkinds. I’ve noticed the same trends working against ChinesePod (statistics suggest our traffic is still mostly generated by word-of-mouth) and some blogs like Danwei, whose articles are regularly indexed below sites which simply pirate its content verbatim.
Now that we have a truly amazing API that makes grown men weep, I thought I’d be more aggressive about spreading the word. This led to a number of searches for “China tech” and “Chinese tech blog” on the major search engines, and a painful stroll through the first three pages of their search results in a quest for genuine, content-centric sites where people might be interested in checking out what we’re doing. The results were pretty dismal. Given THREE pages of search results, this is the best our best-of-breed search engines can do:
Team Baidu: (0.5/30):
- Meiling Freezer Company. (who is buying stock in Baidu anyway? These guys don’t even have a blog.)
Team MSN (1/30):
- Digital Watch (congratulations Kaiser, you’ve got a monopoly on China tech commentary on MSN)
Team Yahoo (6/30):
- Digital Watch (more Kaiser)
- Time Magazine (China blog)
- TechBlog86 (good content meets awful CSS)
- Sinobyte (CNet blog)
- BDL Media Media China Blog
- Little Red Blog (CNet blog)
Team Google (6/30):
- Seeking Alpha (investment site, I didn’t know about these guys)
- Little Red Blog (CNet blog)
- The HaoHao Report (why isn’t this indexed elsewhere?)
- BDL Media Media China Blog
- Business Week Eye on Asia
- Digital Watch (Kaiser yet again)
Two observations: (1) it seems clear why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, (2) everyone else is still doing an awful job. The only winner I can spot in the crowd is Kaiser Kuo, who somehow manages to show up everywhere but Baidu. Baidu’s inability to find him isn’t terribly surprising considering that a search for “New York Times” leaves the engine scratching its chin. As for the losers, I was surprised not to find these sites anywhere in sight, despite the fact that they’ve all been producing interesting and timely commentary for well over a year:
In the end it wasn’t a very successful experiment. I spent so much time surfing around that I didn’t even send out a single email. The Internet is a cruel mistress.
What’s infuriating about the site that often ranks higher than us is that it’s a zombie site - no updates except for one or two China-related RSS feeds, and no ads. No SEO, and it’s still beating us. I wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for the fact that it’s leaving “Danwei” Trackbacks all over the web, and I can’t get in touch with anyone to get them to stop.
Also, this is just more proof that Baidu really has no business bragging about the superiority of their search technology. They’re good if you’re looking for results, but piss-poor if you’re looking for a particular result.
Seeking Alpha’s not too bad. It absorbed chinastockblog.com a while back, and I’ve been checking in now and again there ever since.
Still, the Motley Fool is the absolute supreme ruler of the stock blogs/community sites.
Hey, what can I say, my little blog’s an SEO hotrod! Hmmmm… I really need to tweak the page so it shows up better in Baidu!