Mister Wong is one of the largest Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an free social-bookmarking

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....

 web services

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

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History

The website was a German startup

Startup company

A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets...

, established in 2006. Kai Tietjen had been running an ad agency for nearly a decade, when, in March 2006, he entered the field of web entrepreneurship with the idea to "take on Google". Investing mostly his own money, he created a website that allows customers to bookmark their favorite sites, and then uses those bookmarks as the basic data for its search engine : to find a popular site, a user can search all other users' bookmarks.

The service is currently available in German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and French.

Origin of name

The website extols its users to "Wong the Web!", a reference to the practice of Wonging, often employed by card counters

Card counting

Card counting is a casino card game strategy used primarily in the blackjack family of casino games to determine whether the next hand is likely to give a probable advantage to the player or to the dealer. Card counters, also known as advantage players, attempt to decrease the inherent casino house...

 in Blackjack

Blackjack

Blackjack, also known as Twenty-one or Vingt-et-un , is the most widely played casino banking game in the world...

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Controversy

Mister Wong's original logo, depicting a "cartoonish, nerdy East Asian man", brought on protests from many Asian-Americans. The website's creator subsequently issued an apology and removed the logo.