Symbian integrates Chinese search

Symbian will be creating APIs for integrating search into applications for China-based Baidu, but at least they'll be readable by the locals thanks to the newly-open-sourced MYuppy font.

MYuppy was owned by Monotype but is now an open-source font ideally suited to displaying Simplified Chinese, in combination with Latin characters, on mobile phones. Baidu, meanwhile, is China's dominant search engine and will be working with Symbian to create APIs with a view to taking mobile search beyond a returned list of text matches.

Baidu calls the next generation of search "Box Computing", and the Symbian Foundation is happy to play along with the moniker in its blog:

"Box computing is a visionary technology born of Baidu’s extensive search experience in which they found that search engine users’ needs are not best met by pages of search results that simply highlight where the exact search term has appeared on the internet."

Only the most primitive search engine uses text matching alone these days. Bing, Google and Yahoo spend enormous resources trying to work out what the user is actually looking for rather than what they typed, but Baidu likes to call this Box Computing and has invited Symbian to the party.

And it's quite a party - the China Internet Network Information Center reckons more than 60 per cent of the world's internet users are now in China, and on a mobile phone (233 million of them), so anything that smooths entry into that market is to be welcomed. ®