1. Search Engine of The Song Dynasty.
- Author
-
RUIYAN XU
- Subjects
- *
SEARCH engines , *ELECTRONIC information resource searching , *POETRY (Literary form) , *CHINESE characters - Abstract
BAIDU.COM, the popular search engine often called the Chinese Google, got its name from a poem written during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival, about the search for clarity amid chaos. Together, the Chinese characters bi and du mean ''hundreds of ways,'' and come out of the last lines of the poem: ''Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.'' Baidu, rendered in Chinese, is rich with linguistic, aesthetic and historical meaning. But written phonetically in Latin letters (as I must do here because of the constraints of the newspaper medium and so that more American readers can understand), it is barely anchored to the two original characters; along the way, it has lost its precision and its poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Published
- 2010