Microsoft has recently launched a new search engine with many interesting features to make the search process easy. Microsoft has also launched an exclusive version of this search engine for the Chinese market. This search engine is already online for the Chinese users. However, the Chinese version of Bing is not called Bing, it is called as Biying. In Mandarin Bing has a number of connotations depending on the way it is spoken. One of the versions would mean something negative such as “sickness” or “illness”. In China people would avoid such a negative word. Bing can also mean other things such as ice, soldier or pancake depending on the intonation while pronouncing that word.
Microsoft launched the Chinese version of the search engine on 1st June. This is Microsoft’s first attempt to target the Chinese market. It opened itself to one of the largest internet communities. Chinese internet users amount to almost 298 million in mainland China alone.
The Chinese version of Bing or Biying is stripped of number of features that are found in the US version of Bing. There is a lot of room for improvement with the Chinese Bing. Microsoft has to reconsider the name Bing for China and call it as Biying. Biying means something better, it means, “must respond” or “must answer”. Microsoft is calling its new search engine as a decision engine more than a search engine. Biying or Bing will help the internet users in their decision making process.
This newly launched search engine in China had faced temporary problems last week. Now it is back online in full glory. However, we need to wait and see how the Chinese web users will respond to Biying. The Chinese market is more used to Baidu which is a portal. They can find everything they need from the single place so that they will not have to hop around a number of websites. This is one of the reasons why the world search leader Google did not get a successful presence yet in China. Whether this new effort from Microsoft will elicit good response from the Chinese community is still a question. China by nature prefers status-quo and it does not like too many changes. If there are changes, they are slow to come by.
Biying in general has received only negative response from a number of internet users. They immediately compare Biying with Google and Baidu and feel that Biying is not up to the standard. It does not impress the Chinese users because it is pretty basic when compared to what the internet community in China already has experienced.
As per users review the recommended keywords for searches does not make sense for the Chinese users. Microsoft probably has a lot to achieve with Biying.
How about including a link out to microsoft’s site in your post?
duh…