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PALO ALTO, Calif.–Baidu CEO Robin Li, on a rare visit to Silicon Valley Wednesday, explained the rise of his company’s search engine in China before a group of students more interested in entrepreneurial tips than censorship.

Baidu CEO Robin Li advised Stanford students to make sure they understand the Chinese market if they want to do business there.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

Li ended a trip to the U.S. Wednesday at Stanford University, speaking to a crowd of several hundred students about the lessons he learned shepherding Baidu through the first dot-com bust and growing it into the Google of China. Baidu has 76 percent of the Chinese search market, he said, which consists of 338 million Internet users: larger than the entire population of the U.S.

The key to Baidu’s success amid a terrible recession for Internet companies in late 2000 and 2001 was careful use of the initial venture capital investment in his company and making a tough decision to overhaul Baidu’s business model from providing back-end search technology to portals to designing its own front-end user interface, Li said. He also outlined his vision for future search called “box computing,” which seemed to involve a Chrome OS-style user interface that would run independently of the operating system as the start page for a new generation of computers and use semantic technology to deliver a search result more in tune with the searcher’s intention.

Li was given a very warm reception from the students, who massed around him after his talk to have their pictures taken with one of China’s most prominent CEOs. Only one student hinted at the censorship dance required to operate a search engine in China, asking Li how his company manages the tricky relationships with regulators.

The Internet is new everywhere, Li said, but it’s especially new to China. That means that regulations haven’t always anticipated the issues that can arise on the Internet and lag the pace at which the Internet evolves, he said. But he otherwise avoided any mention of Baidu’s role in preventing Web pages that run afoul of the Chinese government from appearing in Baidu’s search results: a 2008 study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that Baidu censors far more search results than competitors.

Most of the questions came from students who wanted to know how American companies can break into the fast-growing Chinese market. Li said there’s no substitute for having a local presence in China, and not to underestimate the growth of the Internet in China. Baidu’s search index triples every year, he said, and competitors often can’t keep pace with that growth, meaning they do not offer all the pages that Chinese Web surfers seek.

“If you can’t find it on Baidu, you can’t find it anywhere else,” Li said. That, of course, can be interpreted in a number of different ways.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Baidu CEO touts growth of China’s search engine

On June 4, 2009, Google.cn blocked all searches for “Tiananmen Square,” even ones not related to the massacre that took place on that date in 1989. It refuses to say why.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_s_censorship_struggles_continue_in_China’;

Google was going to help democratize data in China. Instead, about three years after entering the Middle Kingdom, the search company still finds itself in an uncomfortable working relationship with government censors.

For about eight days between June 3 and June 11, Google.cn blocked all results that might come from searches for Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Not just politically sensitive results, not just historical accounts of the hundreds of deaths on June 4, 1989, but every single result–including directions to the square–with an error message that read “Search results can not be displayed as they may contain contents that do not comply to related laws and policy.”

As of Thursday, things had appeared to return to normal. A search for “Tiananmen Square” in either English or Chinese brought up links to shops in the area, historical documents about one of China’s most storied places, and images of fun, happy times in downtown Beijing.

So how did Google know that it was supposed to drop the hammer on all results for Tiananmen Square for that brief period of time? And how did it know that it was once again safe to reapply the limited filter?

Google isn’t saying, beyond pointing to previous interviews and statements it has given on its tricky balancing act in China. “Google.cn complies with Chinese laws. The differences in search results over time in China are the result of a variety of factors, including the content that is available on the Internet and the regulations we follow in China,” the company said in a statement last week.

But it has confirmed that Google has dropped a previous method of determining how to self-censor its search results–pinging the so-called Great Firewall of China to see what sites are blocked–in favor of a new self-censorship method that the company refuses to disclose.

Difficult choices

Google’s formal entry into China in 2006 with Google.cn forced the company to strike a difficult balance between its stated goal of making the world’s information widely available and the requirement that all Internet companies doing business in China adhere to government regulations regarding censorship.

In some ways, Google has improved the flow of information in China. Upon entering the market, it made sure to include a disclaimer like the one above alongside search results for sensitive queries, something even Baidu does now. That decision allowed Chinese Internet searchers to know they weren’t getting the full extent of what was available on the Internet for a given query.

In addition, a study published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab in June 2008 found that Google is actually the least censored search engine in China. Google is the second-most widely used search engine in China, behind Baidu.

In the past, company executives have justified Google’s censored presence in China with a glass-three-quarters-full analogy: it’s better to offer Chinese Internet users access to a wealth of information they might be otherwise unable to find at the expense of “pulling a few books out of the library,” so to speak. They are also, of course, unwilling to miss out on perhaps the greatest Internet land rush of the 21st century as China’s massive population continues to come online.

However, determining which books to leave and which books to pull is not an easy task. Google representatives over the past week pointed repeatedly to an article in “The New York Times” from 2006 that described Google’s methodology for making those tough choices.

From the article:

Brin’s team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn’t give them a list. So Google’s engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google’s blacklist.

That system is no longer in place, Google representatives confirmed. Despite repeated inquiries, no information was made available about the new system: whether it involves taking direct cues from the government, self-selection by Google engineers, or something else.

In a way, Google’s reluctance to talk about censorship and China is understandable. The Chinese government’s regulations seem to be written in a deliberately vague way as to encourage Internet companies to censor more than the government would actually like to see pulled from the Internet.

In 2006, CNET’s Declan McCullagh noted that Google.cn censored far more search results than seemed necessary, which was proven when Google restored access to Web sites like Budweiser.com following the article, with no apparent repercussions from the Chinese government.

The Times article from 2006 also noted the existence of weekly meetings between government officials and Internet companies known as the “wind-blowing” meetings; as in, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows in China, you need a bureaucrat. During those meetings, government officials would discuss upcoming events and hint at the ones they’d prefer to go unnoticed, according to the article.

Relevance lost

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, it seems several such meetings took place. Web sites across China were forced to shut down for a brief period of time in the days surrounding June 4, which many of them sarcastically dubbed “Chinese Internet Maintenance Day.”

Unlike Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and Wordpress, Google.cn was not shut down during the days surrounding the anniversary. But it was certainly far more stingy with search results than it was before the first week of June, or at present.

Whatever filter Google is using is both flexible and imprecise. Searches for obvious terms like “Tiananmen Square” and “Tank Man” returned no results between approximately June 3 and June 10, but as of last Thursday once again returned generic results unrelated to the events of June 4, 1989.

However, during “Chinese Internet Maintenance Week,” searches on Google.cn for “June 4 incident” (the Chinese term for the events of June 4, 1989), “Goddess of Democracy” and “Tiananmen Square massacre,” all returned results that one might think would be frowned upon by the Chinese government, including images of the Goddess of Democracy–a Statue of Liberty-like figure constructed by student protesters–staring defiantly at a portrait of Chairman Mao above the Tiananmen Gate.

Google's new filtering method allows Google.cn searches in English to produce results the government might not like. The same search in Chinese does not lead to Wikipedia.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

And during that week, a search for “June 4 incident” on Google.cn actually returned (and still does return) links pointing to Wikipedia’s article on the subject as well as a YouTube video with bloody images of the government’s crackdown on student protesters in the top two positions. A search for that term in Chinese returns what appears to be censored results with the “According to local laws and regulations and policies, some search results are not displayed” disclaimer.

Perhaps that’s why the Chinese government has announced plans to require all PCs sold in the country to have filtering software preinstalled that would block Web sites and even monitor keystrokes in word-processing applications. Whatever new filtering method Google has chosen, it may not be enough to satisfy the government’s desire to keep certain topics out of the public eye.

Google has justified its presence in China as part of its lofty mission; this is a company that really does think it’s engaged in business to better the world. But doing business in China while maintaining the moral high ground could well be more difficult than digitizing all the world’s information.

Excerpted from:
Google’s censorship struggles continue in China

The 2008 DNC is expected to be the most blogged-about political convention in history.That, of course, is just a small segment of the estimated 15,000 total media in attendance. Nonetheless it is worth noting.

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Bloggers At Democratic Convention

Google will be pampering bloggers and tutoring US policy makers at Democratic and Republican national conventions as Internet culture flexes growing political muscle.

The Internet giant is joining news-ranking website Digg and blogger groups to set up a Big Tent for media and delegates at the Democratic convention next week in the US state of Colorado. The 8,000-square-foot center will feature a public area with kiosks for uploading videos to Google-owned YouTube and demonstrations of services offered by Google.

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Google Gets Political

This new PowerPoint Templates website provides RSS feeds for each category. As the category updates the new PowerPoint Presentation appears in the topical RSS feeds. The PowerPoints cover a variety of topics for all kinds of presentations and they can be used with any version of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint RSS Feeds

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PowerPoint Subscription Website Uses RSS