They have not caught on yet, as many Chinese search engines offer no explanation in English of their services, yet their bots are out there crawling all sites on the internet. I am trying to kill as many bots, scrapers, spiders, crawlers, and checkers as possible, and if I don’t find an explanation of what a site does, I’ll ban the user agent from my site. This might seem a little unfair, but I don’t want bots eating my bandwidth, and to have my ISP force me to pay more for hosting, all because they wish to crawl my site.
As I speak some Chinese, I thought I’d write something up for the non-Chinese people of the world. Here is what I can find:
 Chinese search engine Baidu 百度 100 Degrees |
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Baidu:百度一下，你就知道/Baidu a little, then you will know; China’s largest search engine. 百度 translates to 100 degrees. bot: Baiduspider, reads robots.txt
I don’t know why Baidu uses a dog paw logo. It does look nice, but has nothing to do with 100 degrees. Conversely 搜狗 or Search Dog, their competitor, has no dog symbology on their site.
My site is already indexed on Baidu, but to be sure I tried to register for a Baidu webmaster tools account but could not. Baidu requires a Chinese phone number to register, which I do not have. Their webmaster tools site is large, and you can register if you have a Chinese phone number. Of course the site is only in Chinese, which is not a problem for me.
百度为什么你们不能让我们外国的网站长可以注册呢。 给了我的加拿大手机号码，回答《手机号码格式不正确》。世界很大，中国人要搜到国外的东西。百度你们怎么了呢？
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 Chinese search engine Sogou 搜狗 Search Dog |
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Sogou 搜狗/Search Dog : Also arrived here from type in soso.com. Majority owned by SoHu, Chinese internet company, 36% owned by Tencent,
Soso : Chinese search engine run by Tencent, makers of QQ and WeChat, Tencent invested into sogou, then shut down soso.com. bot: Sogou web spider, reads robots.txt
搜狗 Search Dog has no graphics related to their dog theme. Why not? Is it too close to Baidu’s dog paw icon?
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 Chinese search engine 360 搜索 Sousuo Search |
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Haosou/So.com/360 搜索/360 Sousuo Search: Owned by Qihoo 360 Technology, Chinese internet company, Bot: 360Spider
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 Chinese search engine 神马时代 Shen Ma ShiDai, Spirit Horse Era |
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Yisou 一搜/Number one Search: Yahoo’s Chinese search engine, but I can’t find it. I get automatically transferred to 神马时代 Horse Spirit Era, but there is no search. Here’s an MDBG translation:
神马是专注移动互联网的搜索引擎，致力于为用户创造方便、快捷、开放的移动搜索新体验。
God horse is focusing on mobile Internet search engine dedicated to creating convenient, fast, opening for mobile search user experience.
They apparently want you to download a search app to your phone, which I will not do. Bot: YisouSpider
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 Chinese search engine YouDao 有道 The Path |
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YouDao有道/The Path, The Way: I don’t see this spider crawl my site, but my site is indexed on there, so they must use something. Bot name: youdaobot
I tried to contact Youdao, from an email address (youdaobot(a)corp.youdao.com) on their webmasters page, but it came back as undelivered. So much for contacting them, and what does this say about the info on their webmasters page, which is all in Chinese? Not very confidence building. At least they don’t automatically scrape my site.
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| Yahoo Chinese, HK: While I get heavily scraped daily by Yahoo, their Chinese coverage is very lackluster. I’m there, but most of my articles are not.
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Once you find a Chinese search engine you want to include, I find it hard to figure out where to submit your site. So.com and YouDao.com have simple email addresses to submit your site, but I when you write them an email I think it is better to submit your site in Chinese, which I did. It would be good to have an official form to fill out for site submission.
Maybe because China is so unilingual English sites really do not matter? So few people in China can read English, I know.
There may be other Chinese search engines. If so, please drop me a comment. After all, there are 1.4B Chinese in China, so the search market is huge.
