China’s answer to Google, Baidu, has launched a number of search services for cell phones in Japan today. “Baidu Mobile” consists of four main elements: PC web search, mobile web search, picture and video search. But it’s also possible to look for emoji, picture characters or emoticons excessively used especially by Japan’s youth (and especially in mobile messages).
One example for the emoji search featues: If you enter the term “beer” not as written word, but rather as a beer symbol, Baidu Mobile will deliver search results based on that emoji. If you do spell out the word, the results the service retrieves will include pages containing beer emoji (see the screenshot below).
Baidu Mobile’s video search includes six sites, most importantly YouTube and Japan’s very own video portal Nico Nico Douga, and results will come from the fixed web and mobile versions of these sites.
Baidu says it will provide its mobile search engine to companies operating mobile sites, too.
Serkan Toto
I think this can be implemented in Japanese open-orented mobile platform. And I didn’t expected Baidu.com will be enough to implement this about 5 years ago. In Korea, MNOs are pushed to open their mobile network toward other Contents and Application service providers by government. However, they very afraid to open it with collapsing their cozy walled garden. Nevertheless, ‘open’ trend never stopped in Korea. Mobile full browsing services in open platform- such as Opera Mini- are deploying by MNOs thesedays. Soon, this mobile network environment will be more attractive to not-MNOs in Korea.
Thanks Sabrina for telling us Korean situation,
Unfortunately, mobile web in Japan is not so opened, too. Baidu crawler should be able to get data if the mobile site is opened to the internet side, but often carriers’ official sites are closed within their network and unable to crawl. Google and Yahoo crawlers are sometimes got special treatment, as they are used on carriers’ official search engines.
But this Baidu Japan’s challenge is pretty interesting, as no other search engines did not go into emoji handling on search.