Friday, November 29, 2013

Random: Missing


Baidu is one of the more (or perhaps most) popular search engine in China. Like Google, the company offers a host of other services in addition to search. While browsing their list of services (http://www.baidu.com/more/), I came across the following (http://xunren.baidu.com/):
Here is the Google translated version of the page:

From what I can tell, the site is an imaged-based search engine for finding missing friends or family members. You can either submit pictures of a missing person and ask for help, or submit someone that might be missing and see if family or friends are looking for him or her.

Google has the capabilities in image search technology to do the same thing. However, the state of the society is such that it this type of service is not widely needed in the U.S. On the other hand, this is an indirect statement about the state of the Chinese society. Part of the situation has to do with jobs being in more coastal and urban areas. With the inner and more rural areas of China being poor, these people travel to bigger cities for work. At times, things happen and contact is lost.