Two Harvard University genetics researchers hope to challenge mighty Google and the mainland's Baidu for China's internet search market using a software approach originally developed to understand human genes.
The pair - Gary Gao and his professor George Church - have launched Beijing-based start-up YDCTech to develop the software.
The goal is to replace 'keyword' search tools with more sophisticated 'semantic-based' tools, which YDC claims will yield faster and more accurate results.
'We hope to eventually displace Baidu and Google in the mainland market, perhaps in five years,' said Charles Gao, chief executive at YDC (and Gary Gao's elder brother).
YDC believes the problem with keyword searches is that they take words out of context and cannot deal with other semantic issues, such as synonyms. This results in long lists of relevant and irrelevant search results that internet users have to sift through to find what they need.
The YDC approach is different: it attempts to understand the Chinese language in a 'bottom-up' manner. The software treats ideographic characters as the basic units of the Chinese language. Using statistical or combinatorial analysis - such as scanning for how frequently certain characters appear in the Chinese language, among other patterns - it can understand vocabulary and, from there, syntax and semantics.