Today, Google hosted a media luncheon in Central, Hong Kong. It served turkey and prime rib and a Christmas pudding, which I didn't eat because I had to get back to work.

I wasn't taking notes at this briefing, but a couple of things stuck in my mind from the event, much like the way a piece of gristle is now stuck to my teeth right now. Google also gave me a thermal mug, and I am quite delighted about that.



Crid Yu, head of sales, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia for Google, said that search traffic headed to Google in Hong Kong has grown from 26 percent to 36 percent of the market since January 2006.

Yu also hinted that the next Google sales office to open in Asia will be in Singapore.

When asked if he agreed with the idea that Google needed more on the ground sales team to head off companies in China, like Baidu, he said: "That is something I think we could get better at." But he did say that Google had internal discussions about this strategy. It is unclear where the case rests on this. He was nondescript in his discussion about this.

But on the issue of Chinese language searches, it appeared that Yu was saying this was something Google needed to master. He said other companies were very good at mastering character sets in Chinese, which is difficult to set algortihms for, given that individual characters mean something different than two individual characters put together. By my thinking is this is something I would think keyword searching is not very good at accomplishing. Perhaps image searching is better for Chinese?

 

rion
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