Baidu has introduced a new search engine page custom-made for the elderly. From Wall Street Journal’s Juliet Ye:
Google may be offering free music downloads in China, but rival Baidu.com has its sights on the country’s untapped audiences.
Baidu, China’s market-leading search engine, launched a search engine especially designed for older Web users last month, Sina.com reports (in Chinese), the first new search product rolled out by Baidu this year.
The portal, straightforwardly named “Baidu Elderly Search” in Chinese, offers a bit more than the empty, Google-style layout of the traditional Baidu search page. It features larger fonts and a menu of search selections tailored for a more mature audience, from revolutionary song downloads to online forums on Tai Chi and keeping pet birds, popular pastimes among China’s retirees. The design emphasizes clicking instead of typing in order to help older users who might not find it easy to type Romanized Chinese (or pinyin) to produce characters for their searches.