Story from WSJ
After a brief hiatus last week, software giant Microsoft's Bing search engine is back online in China.Microsoft launched a Chinese version of Bing on June 1 at cn.bing.com, marking the first time the company has offered a Web product specifically targeted at the 298 million Web users in mainland China. But unlike its American counterpart (and like many of the other international versions of Bing), Chinese Bing is still a bit of a shell at this point, without all of the handy features that are available on the U.S. search engine.
And in China, Microsoft prefers not to call it "bing," since that sound can have several meanings in Mandarin, depending on the tone and character associated with it. For example, this word: 病. Pronounced bing (fourth tone), it means "sickness" or "to be ill," something most people would prefer to avoid. Other "bings" mean ice, soldier and pancake.
The Chinese version has thus been named "biying" (必应) which means "must respond/answer" and which Microsoft is marketing it as a"decision engine"– something that will provide information to assist Internet users with their decision-making processes.
Initial reviews in China have been mixed. Some users have expressed disappointment after comparing the Chinese version of Bing with China's other leading search engines Google and Baidu, as well as with the U.S. version of Bing. On his blog, Franky Xu noted that though the company is trying to provide unique features exclusively for Chinese users, the localization of the product is poorly done. "It's impossible to go back to the original U.S. version directly through the Chinese site, but you can do that with Google," he said, adding that "some of the recommended keywords didn't make sense." One feature he missed from the U.S. version is the pop-up window that shows a preview of another Web site when the mouse cursor is hovered over a Web link.
Without additional context or background information, users have also been confused by the daily home page images. "The picture is beautiful, but very non-China" said one user (in Chinese)."I guess eight or nine out of ten Chinese have no idea where it is when seeing this."
One function that has won over many users in China is the video search, which allows videos to be played directly from within the thumbnails on the search result pages (a feature that's not available on Google or Baidu).
But industry analysts say this new move by Microsoft is unlikely to alter the competitive landscape in China, since Microsoft's share of the search market has been negligible. The market is currently dominated by Baidu and Google, with respective market shares of 59% and 30.6%, according to Internet research firm Analysis International. (Google boosted its market share to over 30% for the first time this year through its launch of music search and free download service, according to analysts.) Other major players in the market include Yahoo China and Sohu.com's Sogou.
