In case you missed it: WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai
Video: The Great Panda Escape
Caption This: Poster for joining the female fighter pilot force
Pencil This In: November 9-13
More sex in China: PDA police and condom confusion
From The Search Engine Journal we discovered that Baidu won an intellectual copyright infringement case against some major music companies. From Interfax:
Baidu, the largest Internet search engine in China, won an MP3 copyright infringement lawsuit against seven Hong Kong music companies today, a company official said.The Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court overseeing the case ruled that the accusations brought against the Chinese search giant do not have adequate legal support.
"This is good news for us and it will foster the cooperation between Internet companies and the music industry," Lesley Zhang, an official with Baidu, said.
The post also informed us that Baidu is entering the social bookmarking scene. The eventual site will be here, and it's up but not functioning yet.
Last but not least, they pointed us to the latest data from Google Zeitgeist, which compiles search information from various countries and ranks it. In the case of China, you get the following:
What's interesting about this is not the content but how each one is translated into English. Thus, 周杰伦 (Jay Chou) is the "most famous singer," but there are no translations of, say, Danish into English. Take a look at Denmark, where the top search query for September was "arto," followed by "krak." Art? Crackers? Crack? We guess that's what the Google translate function is for. Similarly, Taiwan, Turkey, Russia, and Vietnam -- who also use non-Latin alphabets -- get translated, while this still leaves unanswered the question of why Argentines are so into "high school musicals."
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
post to facebook
This is the first time I clicked on Google ZeitGeit. What is interesting for me is, when I compared China to other countries such as Vietnam, NL and Singapore, I just wonder what is the educational level of people using the search engine in China.
Very interesting indeed.
it'd be interesting to see how this compares to the results from other search engines, like baidu or yisou. but i suspect that most of the results are the same. As for the educational level--well, all i can say is that nowhere, in not one country, was "quantum field theory" one of the top search queries.
High school musicals its so famous in argentina that they r going to make their oun version of that :)
Can you please post pinyin for these? Thanks...
My students tell me that High School Musical was a popular movie. Go fig.
Micah:
you're right, it's a movie. I had never heard of it and the title made me think otherwise...good call.