I’ve known about Chinese domain names for a long time, and even registered a few, but that was just following the crowd. Back then CNNIC’s marketing was quite aggressive — name domains could be registered for just a few yuan, and renewal wasn’t expensive either, only 20 yuan a year. But after calming down and thinking about it, will Chinese domain names ever actually be used? Let me share my view.
- Browser support
If you type Chinese directly into the browser address bar, the browser often thinks you’re searching rather than entering a URL, so you may need to type the full http://, and lower-version browsers will display it as a Punycode string instead of Chinese — for example 【任霏.中国】 would be displayed as 【xn—boq207o.xn—fiqs8s】, which is often unfriendly. If the version is even lower, like IE6, Chinese domains aren’t supported at all, because when IE6 was designed there was no concept of Chinese domains and it had never seen one. In the past, browsers needed a plugin installed to support Chinese domains; now they support them directly. But in China many people still use IE6, which is bundled with the XP operating system. For various reasons IE6 has stubbornly survived for a long time. It’s said IE6 still holds a 46% market share in China, which cannot but be a major obstacle to registering and using Chinese domains.
- Search engine support
Google now has no problem indexing Chinese domains — the URL is displayed in Chinese. But most Chinese people use Baidu, so how well does Baidu support Chinese domains?
Baidu is a search engine, and people use it precisely because they can’t remember long URLs. If there were Chinese domains, Baidu would lose a lot of users, since there’d be no need to search — you’d just type Chinese characters. So Baidu’s support for Chinese domains has never been good. If you use a Chinese domain to build a site, Baidu will definitely index the Punycode string rather than the Chinese domain — 【http://任霏.中国/】 becomes 【http://xn—boq207o.xn—fiqs8s/】 in Baidu, which is also unfriendly.
- Convenience of user input
Let’s take visiting Baidu as an example:
Originally you needed to type: baidu.com — a total of 9 keystrokes plus Enter, using pinyin.
Now you need to type: 百度.中国 — you’d press baidu.zhongguo for 14 keystrokes. If the word is more complex, you’d also need to find the right characters in the input method, flip pages, and select — far beyond the convenience of directly using a letter-based domain. If it were me, I’d definitely use pinyin directly rather than type out the Chinese characters.
- The benefits of Chinese domains
They’re easy to remember. If an elderly person doesn’t know pinyin, they could use a handwriting pad to write Chinese characters and access the web without barriers. But how many such users are there?
So I’m not optimistic about Chinese domains. I think in the next few years Chinese domains won’t become popular, because they’re too hard to use. So I only registered a Chinese name domain, just to keep as a memento — my own name, grabbed early so others don’t snatch it. Hehe. For a serious website, I don’t recommend using Chinese domains.