www.hao123.com - Website Review & Information

www.hao123.com is one of the worlds most visited websites, long ranking in the Alexa global top 100, and once ranked at around 25th. Hao123.com is ancient in Internet terms, having been founded in May 1999. It is effectively the Chinese version of Yahoo! Directory and many Chinese people set the website as their homepage. It is most popular for users with limited Internet knowledge as it encourages 'browsing' rather than 'searching'. Hao123.com was acquired by www.Baidu.com in 2004, Baidu being the biggest search engine in China and an equally massive site. Such is the size and traffic of hao123 that Baidu had to spend some time buying up servers in order to have the capacity required to host the site

The primary income stream for Hao123 is 'paid links' which feature on the homepage and initial category pages alongside featured 'non-paid links', with 200 outbound links at any one time - most pointing directly to other popular Chinese websites. The links are categorised into the following groups:

Weather
Maps
Shopping
Stock Market
Properties
Automobiles
Health
Jobs
Travel

www.hao123.com Features

Hao123 offers a wide-screen version of the site to enhance the user experience of those with modern LCD monitors, and users can also personalize their homepage - much in the same fashion as one could do whilst using iGoogle. In order to use hao123 it is now necessary to sign up to Baidu.com, you can then select up to 10 customised links and a background image as well as various other practical and cosmetic alterations to the interface.

Website owners can submit their websites to Hao123, although a website will normally need to have substantial traffic or exemplerary quality to be accepted. The alternative is to submit a website to Baidu for organic search engine traffic, in most cases a webmaster will attempt both. The success of hao123.com has resulted in a number of 'fake' sites, these include: