It is undoubtedly true that the Internet is dominated by the English language: it has been estimated that 75% of all Internet pages worldwide are written in English. But surprise, surprise: the world’s No. 1 language in terms of the number of native speakers is also the most difficult to read: Chinese, with roughly three times as many native speakers (and readers) as English. China has the second largest number of Internet users in the world (behind only the United States) and its Internet market is one of the fastest growing in the world. In addition, its buoyant economy is impossible to ignore: millions are added each year to its relatively prosperous middle class. You’d be surprised how many Chinese can read English: small in proportion to the total population, but large in number. You may also be surprised how many Chinese yuppies (“Chuppies”) carry a Visa (the credit card, not the kind that is stamped in a passport!).
Do you have a product that could sell well in China? That’s a tough question to answer, but as a one-sentence introduction, wealthy Chinese gravitate toward any product with brand-name appeal or snobbish appeal, and any product that’s closely associated with the United States (sarcastically dubbed the “Wildlife Syndrome”). Mickey Mouse” by certain envious economic rivals). If you’re going global, you can’t afford to ignore China, and if your business has a website, it should be searchable in China.
Below are the URLs for site submission to ten Chinese search engines. All the sites are written in Chinese, but if you can overcome the language barrier, anything is possible…
Top 10 Chinese Search Engines
1. Baidu: http://baidu.com/search/url_submit.htm
2. Sinah: [http://iask.com/guest/add_url.php]
3.Sohu: [http://db.sohu.com/regurl/regform.asp?Step=REGFORM&class=]
4. Yahoo China: http://cn.yahoo.com/docs/info/suggest.html
5. Google China: http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/add_url.html
6. Sobao: [http://search.sobao.com/Computers_and_Internet/Personal/]
7.Tianwang: http://home.tianwang.com/denglu.htm
8. China-holiday: [http://china-holiday.com/newterms/hall/it/sort.asp?sortid=259]
9.Wangluobing: [http://www.net7b.com/net7b_/denglu/index.asp] oh
10. Sunwukong: http://www.sunwukong.cn/add.php
The first six of the above are major players, but the rest are marginal and may well be out of business by the time you read this (then again, you never know…).
Happy hunting!