Today’s Guest Author is Mike, who works for a major search engine company in China. I’ll be traveling all day today, so my response to Nitin’s article will be posted tomorrow. 

Thanks Mike, for this global perspective!

There are several game search engines here in China. But none of them has made a phenomenon.

Gougou, which I wrote about before, also has a game search feature, but mostly on a game download. This is no surprise because Gougou itself is a search engine devoted to file downloads. When you search for ‘counter strike 1.5’, you get results like this:

You can see the name, file size, format, published time and users’ comments of the files. One click of the title will bring you to the download page. The only problem is that you have to use Gougou’s proprietary downloading software to download the file. (it is like what Bittorrent is doing). The files you can download is not limited to games’ install disks, but patches, language package, saves etc.  There is nothing else worth mentioning.

17173 is known as the most successful game portal. But big portals always want a share of the search engine. So they built up this game search. It is very shabby at the moment, it is slow, and it has some bugs in it.

You can search for game news, game posts, game download, game pictures, videos, flashes, know hows, and pictures of the users. Because 17173 is a portal, It has large registered user base, so you can search for a game user, see his/her pictures, the game he or she is playing etc.

Compared with the two above, Baidu’s game search is not like a game search, but a featured page for each of the top 5 most played online games in China. One of them is World of Warcraft. You can see the start page below:

You can choose one of the five games and type in the word you want search.  I entered the Chinese words for ‘blood elves’.  This is what I got:

The results are clustered into several categories: under cities, back stories, news, moods of the players, occupations, map, skills & technics. You can sort the results by time and popularity. You can also see who is posting that results and have a look at his/her profile on his/her Baidu space. Baidu has so many online services, as many as Google has, so it is clever for Baidu to take advantage of its other services.

It looks like Baidu wants to do something to welcome the overwhelming power of online games but they don’t have a very good “game” plan. So it just mashes up a game search with very few functions.

The last one is Souyo. You can search for mobile games here. But when I typed in ‘warcraft’, the results are all mobile phone themes, not games. So I think Souyo still has a long way to go.

Conclusion

Game search is not a very mature market here in China.  We also talked about the possibilities of designing a game vertical for our OmniSearch. I think these points should be thought through before taking a move:

1. Games, especially online games, are basically a virtual society. So a Game Search engine should have some ‘society features’ to help the users communicate with each other.

2. I don’t know what it is like in the US, but here in China, a download function is necessary for Chinese users. We don’t buy games, we download. Yes, most of people don’t care about piracy. So a Game Search engine should have some regional features.

3. Not just PC games, PSP, PS3, WII, Xbox, Mobile Games and classic arcade games, are all games we should think about. (Wazap! is really good)

4. Instead of searching what about a game in the real world, maybe we should search ‘inside’ the game. Like ‘who has been killed today in Second Life’. If you are a Second life player, surely you want to see something you’ve done in the search results.

5. Equipment is good, but can we search for them? Price, quality, rareness…

That’s all.  I hope you like them!

Regards,

Mike

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 7:52 am and is filed under Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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