Fergie's Tech Blog

Google Watch: What's the Word for Lap Dog?

John Murrell writes on Good Morning, Silicon Valley:

Google's running into a vocal backlash in China, and it has nothing to do with its cooperation in state censorship. No, the issue that has galvanized thousands of Chinese to sign an online petition is the search sovereign's choice of a Mandarin name: Guge, represented by the ideograms for "valley" and "song".

Google felt the name conveyed the harvest, "the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience in a poetic Chinese way." The image that came through to many, however, was closer to a stroll in the country than a hunt through cyberspace. "Google gives us an individualistic feel, yet Guge sounds traditional and rural... in other words, it's outdated," wrote one blogger.

Then there's the problem of near-homophones. One Web site operator said, "When I first heard the name Guge, I couldn't help laughing. It sounded like fool, funny and fart."

posted by Fergie @ 5/02/2006 12:24:00 PM