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To: Leo Francis who wrote (31082)	2/25/1998 7:28:00 PM
From: Boplicity	Respond to of 176387

'Search Fox' to lead march on Chinese Net February 25, 1998 Web posted at: 1:57 PM EST (1357 GMT) BEIJING (Reuters) -- Hoping to cash in on China's Internet boom, a Beijing company on Wednesday launched the first major guide for exploring Chinese sites on the global computer network. Officials from Internet Technologies China (ITC) formally unveiled Sohoo, or "Search Fox" in English (http:/www.sohoo.com.cn), the company's search engine for the Chinese portion of the World Wide Web. "Sohoo will be a golden key to open the door to the future of the information age," ITC chief executive Charles Zhang said at a ceremony marking the launch. The absence of a powerful Chinese-based search engine has made it nearly impossible for websurfers hunting for a specific morsel of data to sift through the tens of thousands of Chinese-language sites. Zhang sees his mission as nothing less than the salvation of Chinese culture in the digital age. "If we do not establish Chinese information on the network, the long-lived culture of the Chinese people will be threatened," Zhang said. China is one of the world's fastest growing computer markets. The number of personal computers is shooting up by 30 percent a year, double the world growth rate. The ranks of Internet users in China swelled 10-fold last year from a negligible 60,000 to more than 600,000. The number of "wired" Chinese is forecast to grow to 7 million by 2001. That means more demand for Chinese-language services. Launched last year by Nicholas Negroponte, U.S. Internet guru and co-founder of Wired magazine, ITC was eager to imitate the stunning take-offs of foreign Web guides such as U.S.-based Yahoo!. "Search engines are among the leading success stories of Internet companies in the world today," Zhang said. Zhang says ITC developed Sohoo independently but readily admits the engine is based on concepts popularized by Yahoo!, such as breaking websites down into categories like tourism, business and media. "You can think of Sohoo as a 'Sino-Yahoo,' but we chose this name because the fox is a clever animal," Zhang said. But Sohoo is definitely not a Chinese version of Western Web guides, where gateways to pornographic and fringe political sites can sometimes be found. Each of the 50,000 websites now listed on Sohoo, as well as the more than 1,500 new sites it is adding daily, has been screened by local telecommunications authorities for "unhealthy" political or sexual content. "We are paying great attention to this," Zhang said. "We guarantee that no harmful information will be listed." China's communist rulers have passed tough laws controlling Internet content amid worries the network could be used to leak state secrets and foment political dissent. It has also tried, with limited success, to promote a domestic "intranet" to rival the difficult-to-police global network. Sohoo was developed with $225,000 in start-up capital raised by Negroponte and will generate revenue through advertising, a unique idea in a country still feeling its way towards a free market economy. With heavyweights such as computer chip-maker Intel Corp. and communications giant Ericsson shelling out for advertising spots, Zhang expects revenue to hit $1 million in 1998. Sohoo could show profit by the end of this year, he said.