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GuGe Flash  (View post)

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

Saturday, April 15, 2006
18 years ago4,075 views

Do you know the old Google Chinese name is "Gu Guo"?

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Auto-translation is broken. It never works.

Try this link:
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgooglechinablog.com%2F2006%2F04%2Fblog-post_14.html&langpair=zh-CN%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

"We see each website as a voter, all these search results rankings entirely mutual voters "vote" just decided. Because we believe that the message that everyone is equal before, we only really been in the network of public election, and trust information is valuable."

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

GuGe=Valley Song ?

Herbal Lemon [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Wanna ask, are there prior examples that google is "re-branded" in local languages in any regions/countries before?

If not, why google would do that in China (mainland China, excluding Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan)?

And... for the ad... it is too... poetic. I don't really like that...

Finally... "Before informaton, everyone is equal." Is that really true? Well...

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

"Before informaton, everyone is equal."
Maybe they forgot the add something...
like "Under the Chinese Censorship", lol

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> Wanna ask, are there prior examples that
> google is "re-branded" in local languages
> in any regions/countries before?

I don't understand the content but the URL is "google enters Taiwan market and gets a Chinese name":
http://www.kenwong.cn/post/google-enters-taiwan-market-and-gets-a-chinese-name.html

As for older names, I think it was this sign – bottom of first post:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2004_07_09_index.html

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Translation for the post from kenwong blog:

http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kenwong.cn%2Fpost%2Fgoogle-enters-taiwan-market-and-gets-a-chinese-name.html&langpair=zh-CN%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

As Ken Wong said in the post, Google registered a company in Taiwan, the name is "Ke Gao"-科高...
and for the Chinese one on here http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2004_07_09_index.html
the name is not official...

OREO [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

the most boring ad I have ever seen.. i feel bad for those chinese...

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

OREO,
Same here...the ad is so suck man.

Zoolander [PersonRank 4]

18 years ago #

I think Google is realising the potential of China. I think it is totally cool of them to embrace a vastly different culture. I expect many good things to come out of it.

Splasho [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> Wanna ask, are there prior examples that
> google is "re-branded" in local languages
> in any regions/countries before?

I think the difference is because of the alphabet. I read that people were already using chinese characters that would have made it pronounced GuGe. I guess that almost everything gets rebranded as a translation. The trouble is that as I understand it (which isn't very well) all the characters have meanings as words so you have to pick something which sounds like Google but also means something nice.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Exactly Splasho that's the challenge. There are even urban legends circling around this issue...
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp

<<When Coca-Cola first entered the Chinese market in 1928, they had no official representation of their name in Mandarin. They needed to find four Chinese characters whose pronunciations approximated the sounds "ko-ka-ko-la" without producing a nonsensical or adverse meaning when strung together as a written phrase. (Written Chinese employs about 40,000 different characters, of which about 200 are pronounced with sounds that could be used in forming the name "ko-ka-ko-la.") While Coca-Cola was searching for a satisfactory combination of symbols to represent their name, Chinese shopkeepers created signs that combined characters whose pronunciations formed the string "ko-ka-ko-la," but they did so with no regard for the meanings of the written phrases they formed in doing so. The character for wax, pronounced "la," was used in many of these signs, resulting in strings that sounded like "ko-ka-ko-la" when pronounced but conveyed nonsensical meanings such as "female horse fastened with wax," "wax-flattened mare," or "bite the wax tadpole" when read.>>

Finally Coca-Cola found characters that pronounced something like Coca-Cola, and literally translated to the fitting "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice."

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