VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese digital content firms cannot see any
opportunity to defeat Google when competing face to face with the US giant.
According to Vu The Binh, General Director of Netnam, which once developed the
searching website PanVietnam, which, together with VinaSeek, PanVietnam, were
the three Internet searching engines in Vietnam, xalo, socbay and timnhanh were
defeated by Google mostly because of the technique and market problems.
Binh believes that Google now can satisfy 98-99 percent of the Vietnamese search
demand already. This means that Vietnamese service providers would only have the
opportunities to satisfy the remaining 1-2 percent of demand.
“The niche markets, such as searching for sites, prove to be too small for
made-in-Vietnam service developers to exist and develop,” Binh commented.
In 2001-2002, PanVietnam, Hoatieu, Vinaseek could gain certain successes because
there existed different language codes. However, Google then launched Unicode,
which later became the choice of all the websites in Vietnam. As a result, the
first-generation searching websites in Vietnam suffered fell into decay and gave
their places to Google.
In 2007-2008, Vietnamese firms once again tried to develop searching websites,
when they saw that Baidu defeated Google in the Chinese market to jump into the
No. 1 position by threading its way through the niche markets, for example,
searching for music or news.
However, the firms once again tasted the failure, even though they poured a lot
of money into the projects, because of the difference between Vietnamese and
Chinese languages, and the lack of support from users.
Meanwhile, Google has been upgrading its services every day by providing new
utilities or improving the capability of searching in Vietnamese.
Vuong Quang Khai, Deputy General Director of VNG, admitted that VNG decided not
to develop the searching website Hoatieu as initially planned after many
interior discussions which came to a conclusion that VNG did not have enough
financial and labor power to develop the searching engine.
“Unlike the other software products, searching websites cannot be settled with
just tens of engineers,” he said.
Nguyen Xuan Tai, General Director of Naiscorp, the developer of socbay.vn, also
said the corporation never thought of competing face to face. “if you try a
head-on confrontation with Google, a giant with powerful financial and
technology base, you can be certain of failure,” Tai said.
Both Khai and Binh affirmed that the only way for Vietnamese firms to follow is
to focus on the niche markets, such as site searching. However, if they do, they
are not sure about the development prospect, because of the limited number of
users, while Google Maps now can satisfy well the demand of the majority of
users already.
When asked if there is any opportunity for Vietnamese firms to succeed in
competing with Google, Khai said in a cautious manner that it’s difficult to say
about that, but he is sure that it will require very heavy investment with the
participation of hundreds of engineers or scientists.
Meanwhile, Thai of Naiscorp affirmed that the statement like “outrunning Google”
just aims to advertise for products, while defeating Google is merely
impossible.
Khai has disagreed with the opinion that Vietnamese searching engines would have
the advantage in the keys relating to the Vietnamese language, saying that this
is not a very important problem.
NCDT