“People’s Search Engine” Jike Won’t Totally Imitate Google (But Maybe It Should)

Jike CEO Deng Yaping, via Sina Tech

Last year, state-owned Party mouthpiece newspaper People’s Daily decided to get into the search game and launched Goso.cn. Perhaps because that name was widely criticized as derivative of already-existing search services Sogou and Soso, they later changed the name to Jike.

Jike CEO Deng Yaping was in the news this morning, as she said that Google was “worth learning from” and that it “promotes American values and democracy around the world.” And although she promised Jike won’t just “blindly follow Google” and will walk its own path, she also said that Jike was planning to add search in other languages — right now it’s just Chinese — to compete on an international level.

Big words for a search engine that’s market share in China might be described as microscopic, but it got me wondering…is there anything to this Jike thing? I had tried the search engine out for kicks when it first came out — it sucked — but now they’ve had over a year to work on it.

Now seemed as good a time as any to really dig in and kick the tires, so I tried a series of searches on Jike in Chinese, and compared the results there to results for the same searches on Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Google.com.hk (which is the closest thing Google has to a China search engine these days). Who should be learning from who? Read on to find out!

(Note: all the search terms below are rendered in English, but in the actual test I was using the Chinese terms)

Test #1: Finding Food

Everyone needs to eat, and the internet is full of places that can help you do that. First, I searched for Pizza Hut, because they’re one of the few places that offers a functional online ordering service and delivers to my inconveniently-located apartment.

Jike: The first result is Pizza Hut’s official China page, which is good. After that, though, there are links to entries on different wiki sites, but no direct link to Pizza Hut’s online ordering site. Granted, I could have found that link on Pizza Hut’s official site, but it would have been nice to see it directly in the search results here. If I didn’t already know Pizza Hut offered online ordering, Jike wouldn’t have helped. Grade: B.

Baidu: Pizza Hut’s official site is the first result, the second result is a deals site, and the third result is Pizza Hut’s official online ordering service. Not sure what the deals site is doing there, but the basic links I was looking for were both in the top three. Grade: A-.

Google: Google has Pizza Hut’s official site first and their online ordering site second. That deals site above was Google’s number three result. With the official site at number one and online ordering at number two, this grade is pretty easy. Grade: A.

OK, but that’s foreign food. What about a more generic (and location-specific) search like “Beijing delivery food”?

Jike: Jike did pretty well here, linking to a number of online ordering sites and delivery services, and all of the top results were in Beijing. Grade: A-.

Baidu: Baidu performed about the same as Jike here, except that its results also included a map with names, phone numbers, and street addresses. Grade: A.

Google: Google was also similar, and also included a map. On the one hand, the map appeared to have more selections than Baidu’s. On the other hand, it seemed to include a disproportionate number of Indian restaurants. Not that that’s really a bad thing. Grade: A.

Test #2: Buying Stuff

Test #3: Social Networking

Test #4: “Sensitive” Content

Test #5: Image Search

Conclusions