Delighting Chinese users: the Google China experience

ABSTRACT

Google entered China market as a late-comer in late-2005, with no local employees, an inadequate product line, and small market share. This talk will discuss Google China's efforts to build up a team, learn about local user needs, apply its global innovation model, and won over users in the past 2.5 years.

This talk will cover the results of our user studies, and our key findings about Chinese users for searching and using the Internet. It will also discuss how these findings were applied to our products, and how these products gained traction in the market place. It will also discuss Google's progress in Chinese search relevance, search user experience, and key technology areas where we innovated.

This talk will also discuss the process of internationalization - how Google hired locally, and applied its global 20% project approach to encourage truly relevant local innovations. It will discuss several examples of these innovations - from product innovations like the weather map, the input method editor, SMS greetings search, to research innovations like parallel SVM/SVD.

Google China's progress dispelled the myth that multinational Internet companies cannot succeed in China. The key ingredients, like in any other success story, are: focus on the customer, embrace the corporate culture, empower local flexibility, and of course, innovate, innovate, innovate.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.1 THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY

General Terms:
Design, Management

Keywords:
search engine