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Online poetry new Internet wave
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2006-01-23 13:42 Reading poems online has
become the new wave of the Internet.
Cherry Jiang, a 16-year-old middle school pupil, often has to endure her
mother's complaints when she surfs online. Her mother grumbles that her daughter
uses the "advanced game machine" to play games, chat and visit meaningless
Websites.
But her mother was in for a shock, although pleasant, when her daughter
showed what she has been using the computer for.
"She was shocked after I showed her how to search the background of a poem by
Li Bai (a famous poet in the Tang Dynasty) using the Internet tools," said
Jiang.
Even her teacher at school was surprised on two occasions when she discovered
her daughter possessed knowledge beyond her age, the mother said.
Jiang uses the search engines every Chinese net citizen uses but not every
one knows their functions.
Baidu.com kicked off a second-tier Website recently called "guoxue," which
covers literature, philosophy and able to search the history of China. Its
coverage is from the Chunqiu period (750 BC) to the Qing Dynasty which ended in
1911.
At present, the new site includes 100,000 Webpages and 140 million Chinese
characters. Baidu provided its own content through cooperation with guoxue.com.
Users can use different categories, including general, author and book, to
search.
For example, the result of the key word search "Li Bai" contains three parts
— a brief introduction, famous poems and the book containing his poems.
Users can also read most Li Bai's poems online through Baidu's platform,
which is free for now.
"It's an absolute 'guoxue' content platform and we hope to promote our own
culture in the Internet. That will help young people learn the culture of our
country with its 5,000 years of history," Baidu said.
Baidu's general search can also find the poems and quotations, but often in
the fifth or 10th pages. The top positions of the result are occupied by latest
news or articles quoting the poems, which can't provide users original poems in
the complete forms, according to a Shanghai Daily test.
Baidu provides the "guoxue search" in Chinese only.
Interestingly, "Baidu" was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago
during the Song Dynasty that reads in part — "hundreds and thousands of times,
for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights
were waning, and there she stood." Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of
times, represents a persistent search for the ideal.
On the other hand, Google has also launched a "scholar search" in many
languages, including English and Chinese.
Google's service covers articles published in academic journals. Compared
with Baidu's "guoxue", Google's "scholar search" has more professional users.
Google also has a plan to digitize all books in the world online called
"Google library", but it has faced protests from traditional book publishers
over copyright issues.
Google has also announced it would invest heavily to put universities' books
and out-of-date books into the database for its planned "library" service.
The ancient poems face few copyright disputes, so the search engines promoted
the services for the poems as the first step, analysts said.
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