What Google’s China HQ has been up to…

A gander at the China version of Google Labs reveals several “new” projects:

• Google’s Windows app for pinyin input:
• A Life (生活) search, which includes categories such as train tickets, food, work, and housing.
• A Navigation (导航) portal, which serves a giant page of text links. Nothing new by any means.
• A “Hot Charts” (热榜) section, which categorizes top search results the same way Baidu does in its “Wind Cloud Charts” (风云榜).
• Within the charts section though, is a banner for a Google-CCTV co-production: “Google and CCTV-2 co-planned “Qing Guo Qing Cheng, A program to present China’s most popular cities to the world”.

  The Google part of the site seems to be devoted to search results on certain cities and various related photos, charts and graphs.

  Note the prominence of Google next to CCTV in the above banner.

  Over on the CCTV site for the show (it seems like the city promotion is a TV show), the main banner focuses on CCTV & TsingTao:

  

  With Google + CCTV on a small banner below. And it seems to suggest Google is responsible for its global outreach efforts. Doesn’t seem that impressive after all, huh?

More importantly though, stay tuned this week, for what Baidu’s been up to recently, and you can decide who’s coming out on top 🙂