Posts tagged China
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.
Why web filters could be bad news for internet marketers
Jan 25th
We always hear of talk that web filters are hindering some businesses. SEO key words aren’t always so simple, or so innocent as one magazine in Canada has just found out.
The news that Google was to pull out of China over mounting frustrations over censorship laws last week shocked the search industry.
Just one week earlier, Yahoo and Bing had announced it was to succumb to internet censorship pleas from the Indian government, banning searches for terms such as ‘sex’.
Such searches would return this message: “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content. To learn more about SafeSearch requirements in your country or region, see How Bing delivers search results.”
While we may have been confused (because sometimes ‘sex’ is within context…for example ‘sex discrimination’) by the actions of the Chinese and Indian governments, now we can be a little worried about the impact these censorship rules given that the internet is more global than ever.
Canadian magazine ‘The Beaver’ has recently had to rename the almost 40 year-old title as it has been deemed as ‘vulgar’ in internet search terms.
An alternative meaning to ‘The Beaver’ is something crass that has no relation to the Canadian semi-aquatic rodent, actually.
And that alternative meaning causes web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name.
Needless to say, has internet filters become more common place not just in certain countries and governments but also in the workplace, the past two years have posed a problem for the magazine.
A few years before Internet use became common, the magazine, which now has a circulation of about 44,000, sought its readers’ opinions and decided to stick with the name.
The last issue as The Beaver, which announces the name change to Canada’s History, was mailed to subscribers last week.
Filtering ISP’s is bad news for some businesses, and makes the marketer’s job a little tricky when it comes to key words and what classification their brands and websites might come under.
Some of possible repercussions of this censorship are:
1. This will result in significantly lower connection speeds (in the order of 80%).
2. As the filters will rely on a ‘black list’ provided by a government body, it opens the door to potential misuse or political interference.
3. Perhaps a veiled attempt to ‘Control the Conversation’ emanating from a growing and more vocal constituency via blogs and social media.
Do you think internet censorship will eventually affect you?
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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