From the suicides of Foxconn employees to the technology confidentiality battle of search engines

By Long Ge

Due to the loss of an Apple iPhone prototype, Foxconn employee Sun Danyong, 25 years old, committed suicide by jumping from a building. Whether Sun was beaten and detained during the investigation by the Environmental Safety Department has become the focal point of the issue. However, setting aside these questions, let's look at the technology war among search engines, which is full of subtleties. How to keep one's own technology confidential is indeed a very difficult task.

When we think about these issues, we often compare Google, Baidu, Yahoo, and the latest member Bing. Looking at the entry methods and subsequent development paths of these major search engines, we can see many similarities, even identical ones. Yahoo, which started with a directory of addresses, improved on the basis of an open directory. The later emergence of search engines was also based on static directory information searches. Google took over the market with its vast amount of information, paving the way for the development of second-generation search engines, so much so that all local search engines in various countries have undoubtedly made some functional imitations in this regard. The launch of the Bing search engine was the most perfect, winning the market in a short time and integrating the essence of various search engines to provide a layout format that fits user experience.

From the appearance and search functions alone, we can see that many search engines are similar. However, when it comes to specific core technologies of search engines, including algorithms, they can be considered as their own technical camps. The confidentiality of this information has become the top priority for major search engines. At the same time, they are also improving their respective algorithms. Perhaps we can see the similarities among various search engines from their appearances and search methods, but from a technical perspective, they are different. Just like many shopping websites having their own search engines, their surfaces and search methods may seem the same, but their essences are vastly different. For example: the crawling method of spiders, the priority of depth and breadth of fetching, and the ranking algorithm, etc. Some core technologies have been kept very confidential; otherwise, anyone could just set up a search engine with Lucene + Nutch.

Although confidentiality is certainly important, the suicide of a Foxconn employee shows that an employee views the confidentiality of mobile phone samples as a matter of life and death, and his trust within the company is also based on this confidentiality. Once trust is broken, tragedy occurs. Although many news reports online speculate that there were "beatings" and other incidents, fundamentally speaking: for a company that survives on technology, how crucial it is to protect its technological secrets.