Yahoo Launch Yisou Search Engine for China

Yahoo have launched Yisou! (which apparently means Number 1 Search! in Chinese, wonderfully compact language) to China’s 95.8 million internet users.

Yahoo, whose services are available in 36 languages, claim that their search technology is behind nearly half of all internet searches. Note that the Yisou portal offers a cheeky little MP3 search tab right on the home page, whereas the European and American versions don’t.

The Chinese market obviously has massive potential for internet companies – with a population of 1.2 billion, of which 88% have yet to get on the internet, growth is all but guaranteed. Google have already got in on it by buying a stake in baidu.com, another search engine. By the end of the year, there are expected to be some 111 million internet users in China.

Yisou

Baidu

Published by

Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?