Inspired by Google’s announcement of withdrawing from China, a team of 20 members launched a new website GOOJE (www.gooje.com). Only within half a month, GOOJE was reported by hundreds of domestic media and dozens of foreign media. The highest traffic ranked the 14272 globally and 651 in China. According to the webmaster, GOOJE attracted RMB 100mn advertisement from Taobao and a VC up to tens of million. However, on Feb 4, GOOJE was attacked by hackers, which made the website collapsed. Right now people can access to the website via the temp URL www.dierqi.com.

(Editor: In word by word translation from Chinese to English, Google can be translated into "Goo-Brother," while Gooje can be translated into "Goo-Sister")

Gooje can take away your loneliness

Soon after GOOGLE announced that it might close Google China on January 13, a 20 year old female student in Guangzhou and her team started GOOJE and formally launched it the next day.

“Google’s leave may make us feel lonely…So Miss Wen suggested that we build GOOJE to take away the loneliness,” said the webmaster of GOOJE. However, GOOJE actually is not a search engine, but a social network platform.

The homepage of GOOJE is similar to that of Google, so is the logo. But the GOOJE logo also embedded Baidu logo. Under the search bar, Google Search is replaced by Gooje Search, while Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” is replaced by “Take away loneliness.”

In terms of the search function, take “College Student” for example, Baidu has 100,000,00 search results, Google 78,100,000, however, Gooje only has 128.

Gooje is not a search engine but a social network platform
 
Under the search box, there are News, What’s Hot, Search within Gooje, BBS, Suggestions, Vote and Navigation tabs. Compared to Google, Gooje added What’s Hot Today, Hot Vote, Media Report, and Average Age of Gooje users etc. The SNS homepage of Gooje is similar to other social networking websites, where people can upload photos, logs and so on.

Popular but in trouble

Attacked by hackers and copied by others

On February 4, Gooje was attacked by hackers and collapsed. The traffic also went down due to the attack. However, three hours after Gooje resumed, the traffic rose quickly from 20132 to 11488.

Soon after Gooje collapsed, another imitator GOOOJJ.COM went live with the similar slogan “GOOOJJ took away loneliness.” However, GOOOJJ is more like an imitator of Baidu. The search function is much weaker, only several search results for each keyword.