SIGIR 2008 Keynote: Delighting Chinese Users, The Google China Experience
July 28th, 2008Kai-Fu Lee, from Google China presented the keynote at SIGIR. The theme was centered around — “Can a multinational Internet company succeed in China?”. Many of the presented ideas are applicable to the Indian market as well. 
Internet in China, now:
- Largest Internet market, with over 250 million users (200 million in the US)
- Broadband penetration is 86%, mainly through ADSL
- Internet cafes quite popular even in small townships
Google’s strategy over the last three years:
- Starting 2006, learn about Chinese users
- 2007 and 2008, build the best Chinese search engine
- Launch products designed by Chinese engineers
Hopefully, market share will follow. To show that this isn’t that simple, Kai-Fu presented a detailed analysis, as summarized through this table:
|
Attribute |
US | China |
Implications |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alternatives to Internet | Plenty | None | High dependence and trust on Internet information |
| New Users | 3% | 35% | Embrace new users to gain market share |
| Internet-Cafe Users | <1% | 33% | First time user sees Internet at IM/gaming/music |
| Average Age | 45 | 25 | Entertainment & Communities |
| English skills | High | Low | Highest quality content is still in English; its phenomenal in the medical domain |
| Internet Music | iTunes, iPod | Baidu, PC | Monetizing difficult |
| Piracy | 21% | 96% | Ready for high quality free-software as service |
| Credit Cards | 2/person | 0.02/person | Local e-commerce more applicable |
| Cell Phones | 190 million | 600 million | Mobile Internet users have never touched a PC before (India in a similar situation) |
Using this background, Kai-Fu shared a few additional characteristics of Chinese users.
On new users:
- Internet is more an entertainment source, less an informational source
- Since users pay by the hour in Internet-Cafes, they love the concept of directories. In one user study, he mentioned a user questioning Google’s design with the question — “Did you forget to design rest of the page?”
- More of an emphasis to Universal Search
- Winning on metrics did not reflect on increase in market share
On users in general:
- Time spent on a result page is 10 seconds in the US. Kai-fu suggested it’s much higher in China, about 30-60 seconds. Most of these users are supposedly exploratory and curious, and click on more search results. Many of the queries are also informational, rather than navigational. To support this behavior Google used window pop-ups on search result click.
- To support informational needs of users, Google has turned their zeitgeist into a directory product in China.
- To alleviate the problem of misspellings, Google is branding “g.cn” as their official domain. Chinese users, apparently have problems spelling even “Google”. Query suggestions are also turned on by default.
- Much of the useful content on the Web is in English, mostly in the health verticals. To make such content available to Chinese users, Google is aggressively pursuing the content translation problem. Kai-Fu hinted that as the Web matures, this could be an important differentiation across search engines.
- To be more relevant to Chinese users, Google has developed new applications. One such application is “SMS Greeting” search. Kai-Fu revealed that in the Chinese culture SMS messages are replacing “greeting cards”. China supposedly has one of the highest SMS traffic around the New Year. Such niche applications can be useful for overall branding.
Kai-Fu finally ended by sharing that many of these directions helped Google increase market share from 14% in 2006 to about 25% in 2008 within China. We will have to wait to see if multinationals make further inroads in China. Time will tell.
Elsewhere on the keynote: