Internet

China strangely disappears from Google’s monthly Zeitgeist

Google , Baidu, Yahoo, Alibaba Your devoted Danwei team wanted to bring you a wrap up of last month's top Google searches in the Chinese market. These are published monthly in Google's International Zeitgeist.

For some reason, the latest international zeitgeist does not include any data from China. The list provides a good indication of what urban Chinese are interested in and works to reinforce the status of China's online celebrities and brands.

So what happened to this month's list? Perhaps someone up there - worried about the rise of various Furong Sisters - advised google to drop the list. Perhaps Google was recommended an "alternative" list and found it better not to publish any data at all.

Communist conspiracy theories aside, it is more likely that Google was simply unhappy with too many people searching for Yahoo, Baidu, and Alibaba. These three companies have been in the news for the last couple of months.

It's all quite vague at this stage.

Maybe the good people at Google simply forgot about the list. Now that we have reminded them, we expect it to be online shortly.

In the meantime, Baidu's current list of top search terms in China is:

1. 超级女声 Super Voice Girls (you can't get away from them)
2. mp3
3. 李宇春 Li Yuchun (winner of Super Voice Girls)
4. 小说 ('novel' — duh!)
5. 美女写真 (portrait of beautiful women, where portrait means revealing photo)
6. 图片 (pictures — duh!)
7. qq (popular IM software and portal website, see qq.com)
8. 劲乐团 (name of a computer game)
9. 周笔畅 (second place in Super Voice Girls)
10. 迅雷 (a Chinese-made software used for downloading files)

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