Timway

Timway (simplified Chinese: 添达; traditional Chinese: 添達; pinyin: Tiān Dá) is a web portal and directory primarily serving Hong Kong. Its Timway Hong Kong Search Engine is designed for searching web sites in Hong Kong. It supports web search query in English and Chinese, and indexes web pages in both languages.[1]

Timway
Type of site
Web portal
OwnerTimway
Created byTimmy Yu
URLhttp://timway.com/
CommercialMixed
RegistrationOptional
Launched1997 July

The Timway Hong Kong Search Engine was introduced in 1997 by Tim Yu.[2] It was the first directory in Traditional Chinese. It sorted results by popularity and freshness instead of alphabetical order.[3]

Sina.com.hk used Timway in addition to Google for finding HK webpages.[4] Yahoo also cooperate with Timway for the search engine marketing business.[5] According to web traffic analysis company of Alexa, Timway is of the top ten websites in Hong Kong by 2009, ordered by popularity.[6]

Timway grew, and now also sells webhosting and other services.

History

The search engine was first created by its founder Tim Yu[2] in July 1997. As an engineer and a remarkably book lover, Yu discovered that a Hong Kong-oriented search engine would be way more effective in processing massive data (in both English AND Chinese) and allow user to get the exact useful information.[3] Seeing the great potential in this area, Yu started a searchable directory in Hong Kong even earlier than Yahoo!HK,[7] which marked a milestone in the developments of HK search portal business.

Milestones:

  • Founded in July 1997 by Tim Yu,[2] using a former domain name of hksrch.com.
  • Registered as a Hong Kong registered company in February 1998.
  • Changed the domain name to timway.com in 1999.[8]
  • Education portal was established in 2000. A wide range of education courses are supplied. The cooperation with tens of education providers makes it an education supermarket, thus finding education courses becomes convenient.[8][9]
  • Starting from 2005, Timway appoints Professor Michael Chau as the senior technology advisor.[10]
  • By 2009, Timway is of the top ten websites in Hong Kong according to web traffic analysis company of Alexa, ranked by popularity.[6]
  • Timway ran a website called Timway Quiz before. It made use of the technology of Coldfusion for enhanced interactivity with the users.[11]
  • Few academic studies examined user information seeking behavior when using non-English search engine and Timway is one of the few contributed to this.[12]

See also

References
  1. Chau, M., Fang, X., & Yang, C.C. (2007). "Web Searching in Chinese: A Study of a Search Engine in Hong Kong." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(7), 1044-1054.
  2. "Shaw Net - Shaw College Annual Mentorship Programme and Alumni Career Talk 2005". Archived from the original on March 24, 2009. Retrieved 2009-03-24.CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  3. "Chinese University Alumni Magazine - December2000". Archived from the original on 2009-03-24. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
  4. "新浪網 - 廣告服務". Archived from the original on 2009-03-24. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
  5. "雅虎搜尋推廣服務". Archived from the original on 2009-03-24. Retrieved 2009-03-25.
  6. "Alexa - top Sites: Hong Kong". Retrieved 2009-03-25.
  7. "Yahoo! 初學者入門". Archived from the original on 2009-03-24. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
  8. About Timway
  9. Timway Education
  10. "Michael Chau Professional Experience". Archived from the original on 2009-03-25. Retrieved 2009-03-25.
  11. "Adobe 成功案例". Retrieved 2009-03-25.
  12. Chau, M., Lu, Y., Fang, X., and Yang, C. C., "Characteristics of Character Usage in Chinese Web Searching," Information Processing and Management, 45, 115-130, 2009.
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