Everything in China is a mystery. The country is very large, and in the last 10 years many new things were developed. In traditional business, China has become very successful, but is China able to outperform the Silicon Valley as well? The most dominant example of a service hosted in the Bay Area is the Google search engine. It's the core infrastructure which is used by nearly everybody. The chinese counterpart is available under the URL baidu.com
The website is hard to user for western eyes, because everything is written in chinese. The best way in getting comfortable with the service is not to ask for an english translation but learn a bit chinese. So we enter into a dictionary the english word “Model railroad” and gets informed that the chinese translation is 铁路模型. This can be copy & pasted in the Baidu search box and after pressing the button, which is hopefully the search button, a long list of results is shown on the screen.
Again, most of the information is written in Chinese, but some videos are available too. It take a bit until the video is loaded, but then it can be played very well in the webbrowser. It seems, that the Baidu website has an intergrated video hosting website, similar to youtube, but programmed for the chinese market.
What can be seen in the video is an all chinese, model railroad community. They have created large table with lots of trains. Everybody is speaking chinese, and all the trains were made in China. It looks very similar to western model railroad clubs and they are using digital control everywhere.
Unfortunately, the Chinese companies didn't only copied the good things of the western world, but are imitating the bad things as well. In the video portal Youku.com the user has to watch a commercial advertisement before the clip gets started. And it's not possible to skip the commercial break. The quality of the model railroad clip itself looks reasonable well. The video quality is on the same level known from the youtube, and the chinese speaking voice from the background explains what is shown in the video. The users sees some trains which are driving around and a train station is modelled realistically.
One advantage of the Baidu search engine over Google.com is, that Baidu doesn't indexes all the English spoken websites. This is a great service, because English is no longer the world language but used only by a minority for distributing lyrics of popsongs.