chinese simple / traditional / baidu

[vexxball]

Hello,

...a few basic questions from a beginner.


1) I'm a little confused at how much weight to give to a baidu/ or google.cn search
and Chinese overture results. It's common for me to get millions of hits in
a baidu/google.cn for a Chinese name (simple character) whereas the
same name in traditional Chinese will produce only thousands of hits.

Tho, I get the complete opposite in overture. I may get thousands of
searches for the traditional Chinese but little or nothing for the simple.

Why such a large discrepancy? Are web pages/blogs written in simple Chinese
and people search in traditional? How much do I let baidu/google.cn and overture
influence me?

2) I often see memebers writing about a name, "...but baidu converted it to a variant". What's the significance? Is baidu converting to simple Chinese, making the traditional version of the name of little value?


thanx for any help...

[mgrohan]

1) Mainland china uses simplified Chinese. and baidu is the main browser there (70%+ market share). People in mainland chinese use baidu and only search in simplified. Therefore baidu trends are relevant to Mainland China users.

Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional Chinese, and baidu is not the main engine there, yahoo and google are probably used more and therefore overture/google is more relevant.

[vexxball]

Originally Posted by mgrohan

1) Mainland china uses simplified Chinese. and baidu is the main browser there (70%+ market share). People in mainland chinese use baidu and only search in simplified. Therefore baidu trends are relevant to Mainland China users.

Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional Chinese, and baidu is not the main engine there, yahoo and google are probably used more and therefore overture/google is more relevant.

thanx...that does help. I guess I need better tools since I'm technically comparing apples & oranges [web hits in mainland china w/ baidu vs. searches in taiwan & hk w/ overture].

Is there an overture-type tool that is used for the Mainland?

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by vexxball

thanx...that does help. I guess I need better tools since I'm technically comparing apples & oranges [web hits in mainland china w/ baidu vs. searches in taiwan & hk w/ overture].

Is there an overture-type tool that is used for the Mainland?

There is no overture tool. Baidu has some kind of tool I believe, but I generally go from Search Results and the amounts of advertising displayed in Google.cn and Baidu.

[mgrohan]

index.baidu.com will tell you how many searches are made for the term per day, and also how often it appears in other media, i,e, news

For keyword suggestion use: tool.admin5.com/words.html - also based on baidu search data

[vexxball]

thanx much for all the info. I'll definitely check out those tools