The language barrier is possibly the single largest impediment to the further expansion of the Internet. With over 1.2 billion people, China is home to one fifth of the world's population. This is a conservative figure as one needs also to take into account Chinese living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries overseas. However, due to the language structure, storing and retrieving information in Chinese is much more difficult than in English. To prepare for this potentially emerging Internet and computer market for Chinese, researchers have developed various schemes for Chinese information retrieval.
Some commercial products are available in the market now.
It is interesting to note that while this is a technology issue related to Chinese, the product development and the research are not confined to greater China area. Many international companies, e.g., IBM and Motorola, have been developing effective Chinese information retrieval tools as an important step in gaining Chinese market share. An issue that is strongly coupled to information retrieval is the subject of information input. An autonomous US non-profit, that collaborates with other public, private, and educational organizations, worldwide, to analyze and disseminate information about Asian science and technology. These contain text and often, charts, graphs and pictures.