Google Shihui

» see google.cn/shihui as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Google Shihui opened as a public beta on 13 September 2011 at google.cn/shihui. The name means something close to timely benefit. It searched China's group-buying sites, of which there were roughly four thousand at the time, and returned deals near you with a city selector above the results. You clicked through to whichever site was running the offer, and Google took no part in the transaction.

The timing explains the product. Google had pulled its search engine out of mainland China in March 2010, redirecting google.cn to its Hong Kong servers rather than go on censoring results. What was left at google.cn afterward was a landing page pointing at a handful of products that could run without serving search results inside the country. Shihui was built for that gap.

Group-buying in China was deep inside a bubble when Shihui launched, and that bubble was already deflating. I was reading about that market rather than living in it, and what reads oddly from outside is how late Google arrived. Chinese commentators said the obvious thing at the time, which was that the company was entering mainland e-commerce years after the question had been settled by other people.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what google had left in china ~

By 2011 the Google China product list was very short. Search had gone to Hong Kong in 2010. A few other services lingered in various conditions, and the company kept a presence that was mostly advertising sales. Shihui was an attempt to find something useful that did not require indexing the mainland web directly, since a deal aggregator pointing at other people's sites is a different regulatory object than a general search engine.

It failed, and the reason is not complicated. A search product needs to sit somewhere people already are. Google's own front door in mainland China had stopped being a front door in March 2010, and Shihui opened eighteen months after that.

~ no transactions, only links ~

Shihui never sold anything. It aggregated listings by machine and handed you to the merchant to buy, without gathering user data along the way. That was a deliberately thin product, and the thinness kept Google clear of payments and of the merchant disputes that came with Chinese group-buying in those years.

Thin also meant easy to neglect. Its coverage ran incomplete because nobody maintained it well enough to keep up with the sites it was indexing, and the logo carried its beta tag the entire time. Two years and three months of public beta is not a cautious rollout, it is a product nobody was staffing.

~ the december bracket ~

Google never announced the end, which is why the date took work. The Chinese Wikipedia article says only that it closed at the end of 2013. The Internet Archive is more precise than that: the page served a live copy on 11 December 2013, its stylesheets and images were still answering on the 14th, and by 28 December those same image paths were returning 404. The homepage itself returned 404 on the 31st. Somewhere inside that fortnight, with no post and no notice anywhere, Google took down one of the last products it had built specifically for the mainland Chinese market.

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