Sina (新浪), China’s largest Internet portal, said yesterday it had replaced Google’s search service on its Web sites with its own technology, further denting the US giant’s presence in the country.
“Our contract [with Google] ended this month and the whole Web sites are now using our own search technology,” said Liu Qi (劉奇), a spokesman for Sina, adding that the Chinese company no longer had any cooperative agreements with Google.
The US Internet giant has been losing search engine market share in China since January last year, when it said it was no longer willing to self-censor content to comply with government regulations.
The company said it had suffered cyberattacks from China-based parties apparently intent on hacking into the Gmail accounts of rights activists.
The resulting row caused tensions to spike between China and the US and ended with Google automatically re-routing users of its mainland search engine to its uncensored site in Hong Kong.
The Web giant has since tweaked the way it re-routes Internet users in order to renew its business licence in China, which has the world’s largest online population, estimated at more than 450 million people.
However, last week Google again accused China of interfering with its Gmail service, calling it “a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.”
China has denied any state involvement in both issues.
The disputes have hurt Google’s business in China, with its Internet search market share dropping to 19.6 percent in the fourth quarter last year, from 21.6 percent in the previous three months, Chinese Internet research company Analysys International said.
Google’s local rival, Baidu (百度), meanwhile, represented 75.5 percent of China’s online search market in the same period, the company said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the