Baidu.com – Giant of a Search Engine in China
It is interesting when Hichame in his post talks about Baidu vs Google in mobile search and the Chinese Search engine viewing mobile search a ‘strategic focus’ for the future. Google has been fighting hard to wrestle market share from Baidu in the Chinese market for the past 2 years without much success and Baidu continues to dominate the search market in China. In fact Baidu continues to be the search engine of choice for China with a market share of 75.7%, while its closest rival Google only had a 19.8% share (down 1.1 percentage point from the previous quarter). Microsoft Bing only manage to secure 0.3 percent of the Chinese market since its launch in June 2009 (for more details, click here).
While there is huge potential in the online market in China, Google and many foreign companies still find it difficult to make a dent in the Chinese market due to Language, Culture, Legal System and Infrastructure. E.g. Google China hit a setback in June when the government punished it for allowing pornographic links to appear in its search results. China at one point blocked Google.com and other Google services, and the company changed its algorithm to filter porn from search results. Lots of localization and investment (time and money) would be required in order to be successful in China.
Below are some interesting statistics on China:
- Estimated 298 million Internet users (Source: InternetWordStats).
- 2.87 million website registered within its terrority (an increase of 91.4% from 2007).
- Half of the top 20 site in APAC (by traffic) are based in China (Source: Trend
- 86% of all Advertisers in China uses Baidu, while 60.2% uses Google (Source: China Internet Watch)
- User Generated Content is very powerful in China with 58% of consumer purchased being influenced by online consumer reviews, ratings, blogs, forum and bulletin board (Source: Netpop)
- 46% of the Chinese would search via Search Engine before making their purchases (compared to 25% in America).
