China's Top 3 Social Network Sites
Business - Economics
Written by Richard MacManus / March 4, 2010 2:10 AM
The leading social networking site in China, renren.com, started out as a blatant Facebook clone - but it now has tens of millions of users. Despite obvious similarities to Facebook, there is one significant difference from the U.S. in how Renren and other Chinese SNS are used. The bread and butter of these sites is social games using virtual items. Indeed, Farmville originated in China!
In this first post of a series, we outline the most popular social network sites in China. In follow-up posts, we'll look at Twitter clones, online video, and censorship. This series is based on a discussion I had with Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on China's Internet.
Have the leaders' debates changed British politics for good? Maybe
History - Politics
These televised turns will determine the kind of leader Labour picks next, but the bigger question is whether they have ushered in a new era of three-party politics.
Have you noticed anything? Here we are, more than halfway through the campaign, all still focused on the three main leaders' television debates – last night's instalment of which the aggregated overnight polls awarded to Nick Clegg, with 33.8% to David Cameron's 32.8% and 27.6% for Gordon Brown.
I wouldn't quarrel too hard with that, though I scored Brown a little higher than Cameron. They were all pretty fluent. But hang on – wasn't this meant to be the election when new media came of age and drove events?
Three Types of Search Engines
Business - Economics
The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe crawler-based search engines, human-powered directories, and hybrid search engines. These types of search engines gather their listings in different ways, through
- crawler-based searches
- human-powered directories
- hybrid searches
1. Crawler-based search engines
Crawler-based search engines, such as Google (http://www.google.com), create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found. If web pages are changed, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how those pages are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.
The life span of a typical web query normally lasts less than half a second, yet involves a number of different steps that must be completed before results can be delivered to a person seeking information. The following graphic (Figure 1) illustrates this life span (from http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html):
- The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book - it tells which pages contain the words that match the query.
- The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result.
- The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.
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