news.google.com.tw
by Kerim
A few days ago Munin posted about how Google was offering localized news in Japanese and Korean. At the time I was upset that there was no Taiwan version. Well, thanks to a post a ResearchBuzz, I found that this has been rectified.
They have Hong Kong and China versions too! Although, interestingly, they are both “news.google.com.hk” – just with different encodings.
Very cool!! We’ve been waiting for that.
I see that the Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong pages are all UTF-8, so same encoding just different characters.
I noticed that it passes some really bizarre URL arguments in there that gave me a chuckle. if you are at the U.S. page at news.google.com and select China in the menu selector, the domain stays .com. But if you select Taiwan, it goes to a .tw address and if you select Hong Kong, it goes to a .hk address. If you’re at the Hong Kong site and select China, it stays on .hk. It seems like the China content works from the .com or .hk domains and the content is rendered based on the URL args alone.
I can’t believe that Google is still using font tags and display markup in their source code. Man – what a waste of bandwidth.
Google News for Korea and Japan
Google has launched a Google News site for several new languages, including 503 Korean and 610 Japanese news sources so far. UPDATE: I read over at Kerim’s Keywords that there is now a Google news site for Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong as well….
Joe: I wonder if they do this to avoid being filtered by China’s firewall?
I bet that’s it regarding avoiding having anything under the .cn domain to avoid restrictions.
Regarding the encoding issue, I may have spoke too soon. My initial test was with Safari, which always defaults to UTF-8. But the Firefox browser yields Latin-1 for the U.S. site and Big-5 for the Taiwan site. Really strange behavior on Google’s part, causes problems with Firefox in form menu items.