Mike Beltzner recently wrote an excellent blog post that puts the newly-released Firefox China Edition in a cultural context:
I’m used to a very search-based culture, and was shocked to discover that search - while still important - was a secondary task for all of my Chinese colleagues. Their normal pattern would be to first visit an authoritative source (a portal of some form, either a media hub, a news site, or a topic-oriented site like one for music) and then drill into the information presented. For example, if I’m interested in going to the movies, I would search for “showtimes toronto” and then navigate from there. My colleagues, on the other hand, would more likely navigate to a place where they knew they could find reliable data, follow links to showtimes, and only then perhaps invoke search on the individual movies to find out more about them.
Beltzner goes on to say that “the ways in which people like to interact with that information is likely to be heavily influenced by their cultural contexts”, implying that there’s something about Chinese culture that promotes a browsing-based approach rather than a search-based one. As a result, Firefox China Edition takes on some new features to make it more amenable to browsing.
At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, I’d like to play the devil’s advocate here. The browsing, drill-down approach that Beltzner describes above actually sounds like the way I used the internet ten years ago. Or, in the context of Silicon Valley, it’s about the Yahoo world-view vs. the Google world-view.
Over the past decade, Google has done a lot to “convert” me to using search rather than browsing and drilling-down; one of the best examples has been Gmail, where they transformed a traditionally hierarchical and sorting-based paradigm into a search-based one, thereby making it much easier for me to find the information I’m looking for. So I guess that a part of me wonders if this isn’t so much “cultural” as it is the case that the “search meme” hasn’t arrived in China yet. If that’s the case, then it’s possible that promoting the use of search could be useful in gaining early adopters.
At the same time, I’m not saying that browsing or drilling-down is useless outside of Chinese culture, either: to that extent, the Chinese edition has some really awesome features that would be useful to me personally, such as the built-in Juice addon (which has some functionality that we’d like to get into Ubiquity).
I could be totally off-base here—if I am, I’m very interested in finding out what it is about Chinese culture that results in different browsing habits. And regardless, the Chinese edition is definitely a very interesting experiment.
My name is Atul Varma, and I'm the co-founder of a small Chicago company called 
I don’t know if you’re off base or not, but this is interesting and plausible. China is considered a “developing” country - going through its industrialization phase in infractructure and development. Does internet usage itself have patterns of use that develop similarly for different countries? I’m really not sure, and I’d never say cultural differences aren’t a factor, but I can’t help but think of possibly another example: China’s obsession with moving graphics on websites. If we saw a website with moving graphics, wouldn’t you think “heh, how early 90’s?”
But then, Japan’s arguably more techy than us and all the crazier.
Another hypothesis: perhaps Chinese language search engines suck at this point, at least in comparison to English/western language search (i.e. google). If the search engines aren’t much good at turning up the most relevant and authoritative sites first, then that is a good reason the drill-down approach will be more efficient.
I think this isn’t right, Atul — my experience there has been that the difference is more related to the language and the way input methods do (or don’t) map to searching. I think it’s much deeper than a missing “search meme”.
Atul, I would agree with John that it is not about search but about input methods.
If you take the time to learn how IMEs work and how computer users in Asia need to use a Roman-language QWERTY keyboard to input their own language into a browser search box, you’ll have more of an appreciation as to why mousing is more important in Asia and why Japanese kids are faster writing on their mobile phone with one finger (their thumb) than with 10 fingers on a QWERTY keyboard.
Let me try this explanation.
To write my name in Roman characters “Gen Kanai” takes 9 keystrokes (including the space but not including the Shift keystrokes.)
To write my name in Japanese, 金井玄, I have to first call up the IME (default on the Mac is Apple+Space). Then I type “kanai” to get hiragana, but I need my name in kanji, so I hit the space bar numerous times to select the one that is my name. Depending on the popularity of the kanji, the frequency that I use that particular kanji, and how many ways there are to write that particular sound in kanji, I can be pushing the space bar sometimes 8 or 9 times, probably on average 2-4. Then I do the same thing with “gen”. It takes noticeably more time and many more keystrokes than 9 in English.
On a mobile phone, however, for “kanai” all I do is press 2, 5, 1, 1, then use the selector to select my particular kanji. Noticeably faster, and can be done with one hand.
Inputting language into computers with Roman language keyboards favors languages that use Roman languages by default. That’s an obvious statement but consider this: every person in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, (etc., i.e. in Asia) who uses a computer, has to know the Roman alphabet in addition to knowing their own language. People in Europe or North America don’t have to learn Chinese to use a computer. Again an obvious statement but one that isn’t obvious until you are in Asia and you need to communicate on a computer and can’t do so until you learn the Roman alphabet.
Ultimately, I think it’ll be hard to tell if it’s right or wrong, but more fundamentally, I think it’s potentially irrelevant.
The point I was trying to draw was that the Firefox China Edition will provide tools that don’t assume a search-first taskflow, and it would be interesting to see if that resonates. I think the additional search-related tools might shape behaviour, but ultimately I’m thinking that we might not be able to simply apply our cultural norms globally when it comes to UI design.
I’d practically forgotten the “drill down” approach to surfing. Recently I’ve noticed that I now have a routine cycle of sites I visit and don’t really explore the web like I used to. I’ve gotten to know the places that have what I want and only search if I’m looking for something I can’t find on those sites. I occasionally find a new site to bookmark if I discover a reliable new resource this way. Consequently, I don’t discover many cool new sites these days.
One of the nice things I remember about the “drill down” approach is that as I narrowed myself down to the sub-categories, I’d discover other sub-category headings that I would note down as places to check out later even though they may have been unrelated to my target focus.