China Tech Stories: Summary of Search Market in China
Interesting report at China Tech Stories of tech.163.com’s report on the state of search in China. This graph shows — in green — Baidu’s current domination, but Google is coming on strong, contradicting the anecdotal trashing the company received at the hands of the Chinese users I spoke with last month in Beijing.
Google is even better when it comes to monetizing search. Maoxianjia’s analysis:
“First, Baidu has gained commanding lead in both usage and popularity reach. However, Baidu’s monetization on search is still very limited.
“Secondly, the data pretty much prove Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s remark that the China market is up for grabs. In such a short time, from Aug to Dec. 2005, Google has grabbed 14.4% of the market share in revenues in China which is quite remarkable.”
And in related China internet news, some squawking over the Chinese character domains — the censorship crowd is crying manipulation of traffic — me, it seems logical that you’d have domain names in the same character set as the users, no? Separate issue from who issues and controls the domains.
And finally, read somewhere yesterday that some pundit is predicting 60 million Chinese blogs within a year.
