internet - Most of Chinese blogosphere is missed by the 'international' search engines

Ethan Zuckerman elaborates on the surge in Chinese weblogs and why they are not indexed by the search engines: different blogosphere use different toolsets. While over de past months Chinese weblogs have made their appearances in for example technorati, they mostly are those hosted at MSN Spaces, while the largest Chinese hosts of weblogs like bokee.com are hardly noticed.

A search for the string “spaces.msn.com” on Technorati yields over 2.1 million links. Searches for “bokee.com” yields less than 3,000 links… and they all appear to be on MSN Spaces blogs, which are linking to Bokee blogs. A search for “blogbus.com” yields roughly 62,000 links, most from Blogbus blogs, but other prominent Chinese hosting sites, like Tianyablog.com or Blogcn.com, only appear on MSN Spaces blogs. (A search for “blogcn.com” gives a sense for just how big that site might be - despite apparently not indexing blogcn.com blogs, Technorati returns over 50,000 links for the search.)

I'm not sure whether the Chinese webloggers actually care whether they are noted by the US-based search engines and Ethan wonders whether we can actually talk about one blogoshpere.