They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's not only me though; my wife and I are learning Chinese and we use songs, tv shows and movies a lot for that; when we ask 'can we use X' to the teacher (who is in Hangzhou) she always answers 'I searched but cannot find it' while the first hits on Google are it it including a video on Youtube (not in China) or Tudou (in China). Not because it's banned but because the search doesn't work.
Besides that you are right; especially things they do better; they have Facebook but the messenger (Wechat) is really were it is at; I use Wechat now instead of Messenger and it is superior even when you are not in China. Mainly because it just always 'works' and it's always fast unlike Messenger. Didi is better than Uber in many ways especially for the Chinese; for foreigners it's fine but Uber is more convenient for us as support is in English and most drivers for Uber speak a bit (enough) of English in China while the Didi ones speak no English at all usually.
Bing is not that bad as far as useful dev results go. I still use google at work (I'm an MS China employee) but Bing is perfectly reasonable at home, especially compared to the huge pile of crap that Baidu is.
Didi is great if you can speak a bit of Chinese. I've had a decade of perfecting my taxi driver Chinese though (since I seem to only use Chinese to talk to taxi drivers these days). YouTube is still way better than youku/tudou for content discovery...they have no "popular now" for non Chinese content.
I have in China and it's not compared to Google. My colleagues there are missing a ton of efficiency because of it. When I switch on the VPN (which mostly does not actually work otherwise it would stay on) and use Google, we work far faster and more efficient. I can even find datasheets which are only in Chinese faster on Google than they can on Bing.
I'm a researcher, Google still has benefits in that area. For dev, Bing brings up about the same information that Google does. And it is hard to tell the difference these days.
I also resent not being able to use google at home, so I like using it at work.
> And it is hard to tell the difference these days.
For dev results or? Because that's simply not true. Try finding things like knitting/wool shops in Shanghai on the Chinese Bing and on Google. You won't be getting any knitting done if you use Bing; all the hits you get there are closed many many years ago. There are many other examples from daily life which we encounter when in China; we're going there in a few weeks again and i'll jot down the differences then; there is an awful lot which you simply cannot find in Bing while it's in the top hits in Google. We might search for different things but 'hard to tell the difference' is really just weird to say.
Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises.
In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features like easy OTT voice calls and read receipts. I find iMessage and whatsapp (I use both hourly) vastly superior.
How old is your uber/didi experience? I find both now to be mostly useless to non-chinese. I tried to get an uber to the airport in Beijing last week and would you believe there is no POI in english for "airport". Search comes up empty. This seems recent, it wasn't an issue last year when I was travelling there frequently. I agree, if you do get a valid destination the uberx drivers have enough english to find you and get you where you are going. People's uber on the other hand... its good for entertainment...
This was a few weeks ago. It is worse than last year but I use a lot of mapping apps to figure out which characters to use. If that does not help me I usually just ask someone on the street.
Uber/didi are still technically illegal for China airport pickup, and operate in a very legal grey zone, it makes sense that the software would lack that POI artificially. There are ways around it, but local knowledge, at least some Chinese skills, is needed to get around it.
The taxi queue at BJS is quite reasonable most of the time, so I don't bother with didi.
But this is why doing biz can be hard in China, so many business models operate in grey zones while the government lets them go on while swinging a huge axe over their head. As another example, did you know electric tricycles are illegal throughout the entire country? And China's whole new goods delivery businesses are built around these....
In Shanghai, using Uber's carpooling feature it is much cheaper to take Uber than Didi. I have had quite a few rides (with 2-3 other people riding with) that were cheaper than it would have cost to take the subway. I'm not sure Didi has the algorithms ready to do this yet. I should say I haven't tried Didi in a few months, it may have improved since the last time I used it.
Besides that you are right; especially things they do better; they have Facebook but the messenger (Wechat) is really were it is at; I use Wechat now instead of Messenger and it is superior even when you are not in China. Mainly because it just always 'works' and it's always fast unlike Messenger. Didi is better than Uber in many ways especially for the Chinese; for foreigners it's fine but Uber is more convenient for us as support is in English and most drivers for Uber speak a bit (enough) of English in China while the Didi ones speak no English at all usually.