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Morula, via Flickr (CC license) Does the opportunistic, serendipitous psychology of Mahjong help explain Chinese search behavior?

Why does the search engine Baidu have three times Google's market share in China? This question gets asked in different ways for many foreign products trying to enter the Chinese market. However, a rather interesting explanation is beginning to emerge for the search behavior of Chinese Internet users.

New eyetracking research by Enquiro shows that Chinese Google users and Baidu users literally look at search pages and search results differently. Google users follow the classic pattern where they start at the top-left corner of the search page, and 70 percent focus on the first two search results. In contrast, only 45 percent of Baidu users click on the top-left results. The rest scroll down and explore more of the other results. Baidu users also average more time on each search: 55 seconds, compared to 30 seconds for Google.

A few possible explanations for these differences occur to me:

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First, the tendency to look for the most important information in the top-left corner is the behavior of a traditional newspaper reader. That conditioned reading pattern does not change very easily even when people go online. This may be why so many (Western) sites emulate key aspects of printed pages. But in China, since Baidu users tend to be younger and better educated than Google users, they read newspapers less and thus be less conditioned by those conventions.

Second, I think the "mahjong effect" is greatly underestimated. The most popular game in China provides excellent training in grabbing fast chances in a fast-changing environment. In contrast, Western strategies tend to reward long-term planning, branding, and a stable environment. For the Chinese these values matter less. Chinese people expect to find more opportunities, so they scroll more and take more time to look for those opportunities. This behavior is prevalent in how Chinese people behave in traffic, in business, and in social life -- so it seems only logical that they'd behave like that online, too.

The research itself explores other possible explanations for the observed differences, based on the linguistic differences between English and Chinese. More info from SEO Hong Kong.