Posts tagged Baidu
Google moves to Hong Kong. Is it a sure fire solution though?
Mar 23rd
Google has moved its China internet search engine offshore to Hong Kong, but how long will the ‘quick fix’ last?
The search engine will now provide uncensored search results while still maintaining some business operations in the country with traffic to the mainland google.cn site being redirected to google.com.hk.
But, the Chinese government will still be able to block access to the services, which include Google search, news and images. How long can this solution last?
Google is intending to continue research and development work in China and maintain a sales presence there. However, the size of the sales force will be dependent on how many Chinese users will actually have access to google.com.hk.
Hong Kong – a former British colony – is a special administrative region of China and enjoys more freedom, such as uncensored internet, but China is still able to monitor it carefully.
On Google’s official blog, David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, said: “Today we stopped censoring our search services. We are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.”
Google 99.9% sure it will shut China site: good news for Yahoo and Bing?
Mar 15th
Talks with China over censorship have got Google nowhere fast and the search engine giant is now “99.9%” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, according to weekend reports. But what will its China exit mean for other search brands and furthermore, search advertising?
If there were a set of traffic lights blocking Google competitors wishing to expand in China with a red light, it’d now turn green – or at least yellow.
There are more than 380 million internet users in China and the search engine market is now estimated to be worth over $1.5 billion. And it’s still growing! At a phenomenal rate, actually. From 2006 to 2010, it is expected to see a compound annual growth in excess of 30%.
But the Chinese internet market is still relatively young, and as the rest of the nation starts to get online, the size of its search market is set to rocket. Is it really a good idea for Google to get out?
Google seems to be holding its search engine to ransom. It’s annoyed it can’t get what it wants, but what Google is perhaps failing to realise is, if it exits China, it will lose a massive slice of the potential search marketing pie and could open the road for Yahoo to overtake it in the usage stakes.
Yahoo and Microsoft are on the path of assault and Bing is already doing incredibly well. Imagine if it goes into China and cleans up, picking up where Google left off. There’s a whole search worked out there, censorship or not, there’ll now be a huge gap in the search market in China.
Even though Yahoo has been present in China for some time, it has never enjoyed the popularity it would like – but China remains somewhat of an untapped market in an economy that is crying out for reform and change.
Is Baidu the real reason why Google wants to leave China?
Jan 13th
Google can never be number one in China, but it can stay number one in the West – where is needs to now focus its concentration given the rise of rival Microsoft.
Baidu is pretty much putting it to Google. The Beijing-based search engine dominates in China and has a market share of 77%. Google’s share is a mere 17%.
Is Google using the recent cyber attacks as an excuse to pull out of a market where it knows it can never be number one?
Baidu boasts more than 740 million web pages, 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files. By comparison, Google has more than one trillion web pages and billions of images. So what’s the cause of this disparity?
Google came to the Chinese market in 2006 (selling a stake it owned in Baidu tp pursue its own agenda). Baidu has been around since 2000. That’s a lot of time to get a head start, especially when Google is continuing to struggle with the Chinese government regulations.
The search engine king stated in 2008 that it was aiming to expand in China as the economy was booming and many western brands looked to cash in. But over the past year, its efforts have been hindered by censorship and Chinese loyalty as well as the effects of the worldwide financial crisis.
Its ambitions in China, though, go beyond the traditional online advertising and search – the company is still believed to be looking for multiple ways to introduce its Android platform in the region, despite the fact that Baidu has teamed up with China Mobile in a bid to also capture the mobile internet market.
How Google fares in China now will tell us a lot about what the company is made of since it is one of the few places where it will need to fight from behind rather than defend from the top. But has it lost its drive and patience for the Chinese market?
These recent cyber attacks certainly aren’t the first the search engine has encountered. Google’s Gmail went down for several hours last year in three separate major service disruptions.
The outages prompted commentators to suggest that users may soon switch to Microsoft’s new Bing.
And therein lies my point, Google has bigger problems than competing with Baidu in China. Its main focus at the moment is protecting its market share in the west and its leading position over both Yahoo and Microsoft.
It has already spent the last six months bolstering its advertising efforts, launching its first global advertising campaign, and ensuring new revenues by entering the mobile phone and consumer markets. It has also investing heavily in improving its search business for advertisers.
China is simply not the search giant’s highest priority at this point – a time of heavy competition in search. And it wouldn’t be unreasonable to hypothesize that Google is using the recent hackings in China as a cover to get out of a market where it knows it can never dominate.
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