China’s state-run People’s Daily newspaper has launched its own search engine. Shanghaiist’s Patrick Keefe manages to contain his enthusiasm:
While the term jike’s actual meaning is “immediate”, People’s Daily reports that it “also chose the name because it sounds like ‘geek’ in English, ‘representing a computer expert or enthusiast.'” […]
As for functionality and layout, Jike is exactly the same as any other search engine. It has the ever so familiar basic logo in the middle with search bar directly underneath. The only thing that it does differently is that it un-surprisingly censors anything you search. For example, when we searched the words “Ai wei wei” there were no mentions of his arrest or disappearance, but by coincidence, the second item that comes up is his supposed “plagiarism” of another artists work.
Criticism aside, Jike actually does have at least one interesting feature that sets itself apart from its western equivalents. If you type the pinyin of any word into the search bar, it will automatically give you a list of appropriate characters as well as the possible English meanings for the pinyin you entered. Kind of cool, right? (It should be mentioned that Baidu does this too, with varying success).
