This morning was spent at the temple of heaven. It wasn't as long a tour as yesterday and the weather was slightly warmer, but since I had to dress up today, I couldn't wear as much warm stuff. The temples were very nice but the fun part was seeing all of the people in the park around the temple. There were many elderly people who came to the park to meet up with friends, play mahjong, or exercise. There were people playing hacky sack and doing dance classes. Also, there were people riding skate boards and partner dancing, all in the freezing cold. People here retire in there 50s so this is how they spend there newly acquired free time.
Later, we had a big lunch and went to see the Olympic stadium. There are some pretty impressive buildings here in Beijing. One of the hotels next to the stadium looks like a dragon.
After that, we went to Baidu headquarters to learn about the company. We met with a Haas alumni from '88 there who took us around and told us a little bit about the search product and the founding of the company. Robin Lee, the founder apparently got a page ranking algorithm patent on using link citations for increasing page rank prior to Larry and Sergey. I'll have to check out the history of this when I get home. I got the feeling that Baidu is very proud of being an innovative company that caters to its user base and innovates quickly, but from what I saw it was completely similar to Google. The unique pieces were its applications, which loaded within the search results, and the Chinese natural language search, because there are no spaces between characters in Chinese. Another interesting piece was that there was a full music search with mp3s for download for free. Our guide said that we should download all the music that we want while we are on this trip while it is legal and legitimate. Baidu has partnered with many music labels apparently.
After that, we went to Baidu headquarters to learn about the company. We met with a Haas alumni from '88 there who took us around and told us a little bit about the search product and the founding of the company. Robin Lee, the founder apparently got a page ranking algorithm patent on using link citations for increasing page rank prior to Larry and Sergey. I'll have to check out the history of this when I get home. I got the feeling that Baidu is very proud of being an innovative company that caters to its user base and innovates quickly, but from what I saw it was completely similar to Google. The unique pieces were its applications, which loaded within the search results, and the Chinese natural language search, because there are no spaces between characters in Chinese. Another interesting piece was that there was a full music search with mp3s for download for free. Our guide said that we should download all the music that we want while we are on this trip while it is legal and legitimate. Baidu has partnered with many music labels apparently.
The next interesting part of the tour was that our guide was happy to directly address the question of censorship. It seemed like he was very against censorship and the current regime but that the company was happy to operate within the rules to do business. I wonder how much work they do to enforce censorship and how much the government actually supports them and actively keeps Google away.
Tonight was an alumni dinner where we had a couple of people who happened to be in Beijing on business. There was one guy who was the president of the Asian alumni association and another girl from the class of 03.
After dinner was the Chinese style foot massage which was pretty fun. I went in with a group of 5 other guys and we were all adamant about having girls do the massages rather than guys, which led to a bunch of laughs and jokes. The foot massage includes a bit of a back massage as well and lasted and hour and a half. It was very relaxing.
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