{"id":3084,"date":"2015-02-10T10:55:45","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T10:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk\/policy\/?p=3084"},"modified":"2020-12-07T14:25:32","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T14:25:32","slug":"will-chinas-new-national-search-engine-chinaso-fare-better-than-the-little-search-engine-that-couldnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/will-chinas-new-national-search-engine-chinaso-fare-better-than-the-little-search-engine-that-couldnt\/","title":{"rendered":"Will China\u2019s new national search engine, ChinaSo, fare better than \u201cThe Little Search Engine that Couldn\u2019t\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"State
State search engine ChinaSo launched in March 2014 following indifferent performance from the previous state-run search engine Jike. Its long-term impact on China\u2019s search market and users remains unclear.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Jike, the Chinese state-run search engine, launched in 2011, its efforts received a mixed response. The Chinese government pulled out all the stops to promote it, including placing Deng Yaping, one of China\u2019s most successful athletes at the helm<\/a>. Jike strategically branded itself as friendly, high-tech, and patriotic to appeal to national pride, competition, and trust. It also signaled a serious attempt by a powerful authoritarian state to nationalize the Internet within its territory, and to extend its influence in the digital sphere. However, plagued by technological inferiority, management deficiencies, financial woes and user indifference, Jike failed in terms of user adoption, pointing to the limits of state influence in the marketplace.<\/p>\n

Users and critics remain skeptical of state-run search engines. While some news outlets referred to Jike as \u201cthe little search engine that couldn\u2019t<\/a>,\u201d Chinese propaganda was busy at work rebranding, recalibrating, and reimagining its efforts. The result? The search engine formally known as Jike has now morphed into a new enterprise known as \u201cChinaSo\u201d<\/a>. This transformation is not new — Jike originally launched in 2010 under the name Goso, rebranding itself as Jike a year later. The March 2014 unveiling of ChinaSo was the result of the merging of the two state-run search engines Jike and Panguso.<\/p>\n

Only time will tell if this new (ad)venture will prove more fruitful. However, several things are worthy of note here. First, despite repeated trials, the Chinese state has not given up on its efforts to expand its digital toolbox and weave a \u2018China Wide Web\u2019. Rather, state media have pooled their resources to make their collective, strategic bets. The merging of Jike and Panguso into ChinaSo was backed by several state media giants, including People\u2019s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and China Central Television. Branded explicitly as \u201cChina Search: Authoritative National Search,\u201d ChinaSo reinforces a sense of national identity. How does it perform? ChinaSo now ranks 225th in China and 2139th\u00a0globally (Alexa.com, 8 February 2015), up from Jike\u2019s ranking of 376th in China and 3,174th globally that we last recorded in May 2013. While ChinaSo\u2019s rankings have increased over time, a low adoption rate continues to haunt the state search engine. Compared to China\u2019s homegrown commercial search giant Baidu that ranks first\u00a0in China and fifth\u00a0globally (Alexa.com, 8 February 2015), ChinaSo has a long way to go.<\/p>\n

Second, in terms of design, ChinaSo has adopted a mixture of general and vertical search to increase its appeal to a wide range of potential users. Its general search, similar to Google\u2019s and Baidu\u2019s, allows users to query through a search box to receive results in a combination of text, image and video formats based on ChinaSo\u2019s search engine that archives, ranks, and presents information to users. In addition, ChinaSo incorporates vertical search focusing on a wide range of categories such as transportation, investment, education and technology, health, food, tourism, shopping, real estate and cars, and sports and entertainment. Interestingly, ChinaSo also guides searchers by highlighting \u201ctop search topics today\u201d as users place their cursor in the search box. Currently, various \u201canti-corruption\u201d entries appear prominently which correspond to the central government\u2019s high-profile anti-corruption campaigns. Given the opaqueness of search engine operation, it is unclear whether the \u201ctop searches\u201d are ChinaSo\u2019s editorial choices or search terms based on user queries. We suspect ChinaSo strategically prioritizes this list to direct user attention.<\/p>\n

Third, besides improved functionality that enhances ChinaSo\u2019s priming and agenda-setting abilities, it continues to practice (as did Jike) sophisticated information filtering and presentation. For instance, a search of \u201cNew York Times\u201d returns not a single result directing users to the paper\u2019s website — as it is banned in China. Instead, on the first page of results, ChinaSo directs users to several Chinese online encyclopedia entries for New York Times<\/em>, stock information of NYT, and sanctioned news stories relating to the NYT that have appeared in such official media outlets as People\u2019s Net<\/em>, China Daily<\/em>, and Global Times<\/em>. All information appears in Chinese, which has acted as a natural barrier to the average Chinese user who seeks information outside China. Although Chinese language versions of foreign new organizations such as NYT Chinese, WSJ Chinese, and BBC Chinese exist, they are invariably blocked in China.<\/p>\n

Last, ChinaSo\u2019s long-term impact on China\u2019s search market and users remains unclear. While many believe ChinaSo to be a \u201cwaste of taxpayer money\u201d due to its persistent inability to carve out its market share in competition, others are willing to give it a shot<\/a>, especially with regard to queries for official policies and statements, remarking that \u201c[there] is nothing wrong with creating a state-run search engine service\u201d and that ChinaSo\u2019s results are better than those of its commercial counterparts. It seems that users either do not care or remain largely unaware of the surveillance capacities of search engines. Although recent scholarship (for instance here<\/a> and here<\/a>) has started to probe the Chinese notion and practices of privacy in social networking sites, no research has been conducted with regard to search-related privacy concerns in the Chinese context.<\/p>\n

The idea of a state-sponsored search engine is not new, however. As early as 2005, a few European countries proposed a Euro-centric search engine \u201cProject Quaero\u201d<\/a> to compete against Google and Yahoo! in what was perceived to be the \u201cthreat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.\u201d In the post-Snowden world, not only are powerful authoritarian countries\u2014China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey\u2014interested in building their own national search engines, democratic countries like Germany and Brazil have also condemned the U.S. government and vowed to create their own \u201cnational Internets<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The changing international political landscape compels researchers, policy makers and the public to re-evaluate previous assumptions of internationalism and confront the reality of the role of the Internet as an extension of state power and national identity instead. In the near future, the \u201cthe return of the state<\/a>\u201d, reflected in various trends to re-nationalize communication networks, will likely go hand in hand with social, economic and cultural changes that cross national and international borders. ChinaSo is part and parcel of the \u201cgeopolitical turn\u201d in policy and Internet studies<\/a> that should command more scholarly and public attention.<\/p>\n

Read the full article:<\/strong> Jiang, M. & Okamoto, K. (2014) National identity, ideological apparatus, or panopticon? A case study of the Chinese national search engine Jike<\/a>. Policy and Internet 6\u00a0(1) 89-107.<\/p>\n

Min Jiang<\/a> is an Associate Professor, in the department of Communication Studies, UNC Charlotte. Kristen Okamoto<\/a> is a Ph.D. Student in the school of Communication Studies, University of Ohio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Jike, the Chinese state-run search engine, launched in 2011, its efforts received a mixed response. The Chinese government pulled out all the stops to promote it, including placing Deng Yaping, one of China\u2019s most successful athletes at the helm. Jike strategically branded itself as friendly, high-tech, and patriotic to appeal to national pride, competition, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":3101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,14],"tags":[55,162,171,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3084"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3789,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084\/revisions\/3789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensr.oii.ox.ac.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}