Poetry News

Chinese Search Engine Poetry

Originally Published: May 17, 2010

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Ruiyan Xu describes how the internet's changing landscape is affecting the poetry inherent in the Chinese language:

BAIDU.COM, the popular search engine often called the Chinese Google, got its name from a poem written during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival, about the search for clarity amid chaos. Together, the Chinese characters bi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light” . . .