Perhaps once more China is leading the way as China’s largest search engine tailors a portal for older Web surfers.

One can still debate the logic of the country’s leading search engine launching a portal geared specifically for older Web surfers. Trekking out to 123.baidu.com — instead of the flagship www.baidu.com — opens a page with oversized fonts, few ads, and links to sites dedicated to things like tai-chi, revolutionary-song downloads, and calligraphy, all common interests for older people in China. 

The portal, which labels itself “Baidu elderly search,” also includes a classical Chinese poetry forum that older Chinese are far more likely to appreciate than the younger generation.  According to IDG News Service, older Internet users are still rare in the world’s most populous nation. Less than 6% of China’s Internet users are over 50, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

That isn’t to say that similar facilities do not exist in the west, since you can find SeniorsSearch, one of the  Senior Friendly Web Sites, which is available to Wired Seniors Members. 

Providing seniors-friendly websites is not something that Google has ventured into even though Seniors are the fastest growing segment of the population.  Baidu hopes the new site will give the company another property in its arsenal as it continues to fend off the challenge from Google. Baidu seems to already have other demographic groups covered; it launched search engine for “youth” in 2006.

China has so often been ahead of the western world as we can see from the biography* of Joseph Needham.  This English intellectual from my alma mater, Caius College in Cambridge, wrote Science and Civilization in China, a twenty-four-volume masterpiece, which is known as the most important set of books telling the west what Chinese have contributed to the world.

The 17th-century philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon declared that nothing had changed the world more profoundly than three great inventions: gunpowder, printing and the compass. But what the philosopher didn’t know was that all the three had already been conceived of and successfully employed by a single people — the Chinese.

China has an astonishing history of invention and technology, and  the extraordinary rise of the Chinese nation continues to this day.  There will probably be many other innovations in the online search world where China will have something to teach the rest of us.

* The full title of the book is Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China. by Simon Winchester.

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