By Chen Jing

With the exaltation of internet's popularity in China, more and more people would search answers on the Internet when coming across the problems difficult to answer. The latest report from China Internet Network Information Center showed that by June 30, 2009, the netizen number in China has reached 338 million.

The report pointed out by the end of June, 2009, 69.4 percent of the netizen use search engines, and the usage rate has increased by 1.4 percentage points than that in the end of 2008. Search engines have become important entrances to obtain information for the netizen, and are influencing netizen's network life and realistic life.

However, do you find the answers that search engines give you are not completely satisfying sometimes? Do you also know those search engines can provide some services that you have never imagined? By means of this special topic, we will tell you how to "search" the world with facility.

In the end of this July, Microsoft and Yahoo announced jointly that they would have cooperation on the Internet search engine business, intending to increase the inappreciable market shares of its search engine "Bing". And in August, Google's new search engine system, where part of basic framework has been newly compiled, began to be tried out. Nearly at the same time, Li Yanhong, Chairman of the Board of Baidu.com, announced that Baidu would adopt a new calculation method - "Box Computing" to answer users' questions as exact as possible.

In fact, all of those search giants' movements have pointed to the same direction, that is, how to make search engines handier. In brief, for those questions with a simple and definite answer, for example, if you want to know how many lions are carved in Lugouqiao Bridge, the search engines can give you the answer at once.

But for such a question like "Is there any restful and fair-sounding songs", it's difficult to search a proper answer. People find that it's difficult more and more to find out what they want from the substantive and irregular informations on the Internet.

Statistics showed that the satisfaction degree of search users was 77 percent in 2005 while only 65 percent in 2009. Every time when users put forward search requests, 50 percent of the searched results cannot satisfy users' real demands.

In order to get the answer as exact as possible, many netizens begin to input more key words in the search box. Over the past one year, the length of key words that China's netizens input has increased by 29 percent, however, for the moment, what search engines need to do is not to teach people how to use the complex technology in matching the key words, but to understand netizens' demands wisely.

Technical breakthrough: quality prior to quantity

iResearch Consulting Group, a domestic survey and research institute, stated in its Report on The Development of China's Commercial Search Industry that, Internet users' demands on information are developing towards a diversified direction, the information demands in some field has not been numerous and extensive any more, but profound and intensive; meanwhile, users' requirements on the informations have not focused on quantity any more, but quality, namely, what users focus on are whether the informations can meet their actual demands, whether the informations provided are exact, authorized and timely, and so on. If general search engines want to realize such a purpose, technical breakthrough is a main method, in other words, netizens can enjoy their more and more powerful achievements without doing anything.

Currently, such new terms related to technical innovation as "Box Computing", "Cloud Computing"�� have emerged in endlessly.

Li Yanhong expressed that "box" would be a demand collector and analyzer with powerful functions. What's more, "box" can match the best application and service in accordance with users' demands within a selectable range on the Internet, and browser, office software and other software can run in the "box". Presently, such simple applications as dictionaries, calculators and calendars have been able to run in Baidu's "box" and in the near future, other software like video and antivirus software will be opened and put into use successively, too.

And Google's "Cloud Computing" integrates multiple contents, including pictures, music and blogs. Take searching "PC World" as an example, the old search engine spends 0.15 second while the new one only spends 0.09 second.

Vertical search: one-step service

Lots of netizens use their most-frequently-used general search engine directly only when they need search engines for answers, in fact, for such more professional vertical search items like searching air tickets, hotels, maps, blogs and shopping, some small but professional search engines are more specialized. They are of various features and able to assist users to find the answer with one step.

In the past three years, the emergence of industrial and vertical search engines has rewritten China's search development history in some extent. Such search engines with better reputation includes www.qunar.com for air tickets, www.58.com for sorted information and www.aibang.com for living.

Since this year, portal websites are not willing to be outdone and have also made great efforts in the field of vertical search. www.sogou.com announced that in the first quarter of 2009, the performance of its search services on such fields as community, map, picture and music has increased by 56 percent, 36 percent, 9.3 percent and 2.4 percent respectively, among which, Sogou music search ranks No.2 stably in the market and its picture search sticks to the top three; in June, www.youdao.com, a search engine affiliated to www.163.com, officially announced the launch of its three brand new functions, namely, "mobile phone shopping assistant", "historical inquiry" and "my collection", intending to expand its market shares on Chinese shopping search; in July, www.soso.com, a search engine affiliated to www.qq.com, reached a strategic cooperation with www.qunar.com, a vertical travel search brand at home, intending to reinforce its service capacity in content.

In the future, vertical search will be developed further. Liu Bing, Director of Research Department of China Internet Network Information Center, figured that it's possible to have a breakthrough in such aspects as semantic meaning search, phonetic sound search and image search. "All of these technologies are important breakthrough points, although there have been several companies engaged in the breakthrough of technologies, a qualitative leap has not yet been achieved."