When speaking about innovation and pleasing design on the Chinese web, the hobbies-based social network Douban is probably the company that most Chinese web folks look up to. While Douban isn’t as large as Tencent, Baidu, or Sina, I often hear friends complimenting on its creativity.
Its products are usually gorgeously designed with a very good user experience. While I don’t use Douban’s products on a daily basis, I did give its Alphatown a try. It’s a real-time virtual community that allows you to navigate and chat with friends from street to street. The user experience is so awesome that my words really can’t do justice to it.
With great products come great supporters. One Douban fan has developed (or asked someone to develop) a Douban search engine, Doucr, to crawl its web properties. The search engine helps users to find blogs, music, videos, pictures, BBS discussions, etc., that are hosted across all Douban products.
The search engine provides pretty detailed search results thanks to a Google custom search. And the site creator explained that Douban has more than just music and books but also articles and pictures etc which are all hosted on the social media site.
It looks like there’s no agenda – just a hardcore Douban fan who hopes to promote Douban and make its content even more easy to find by other Chinese web users.
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
