Google and Sina Ready To Compete Against Baidu?

Google and Sina announced a partnership in China last week. In short,

  • Google will power Sina’s natural search results, which will allow Google to gain search market share in China. According to iResearch, Google’s web search market share in China was 18.1% which was behind baidu’s 66.3% in December 2006.
  • In return, Sina will become paid search and contextual advertising partner of Google, in which the two companies will share the search and contextual advertising revenues.

I believe Sina chose Google ahead of Baidu due to the three reasons below:

  • Many advertisers and publishers believe that Google Adsense’s contextual ads are more relevant than that of Baidu’s.
  • Baidu has become a major threat to Sina. The obvious reason is that Baidu has been expanding its online empire with the additions of popular services like Baidu Space, Baidu Zhidao, Baidu Baike, Baidu Post, Baidu Life and so on.
  • Search market share of Sina in China was less than 1% in December 2006. Obviously it does not make much sense for Sina to spend considerable budgets in maintaining its search engine algorithm. However, Sina’s own search engine algorithm iAsk will still be used to power other search verticals such as blog search, news search, image search and answers search across Sina’s web properties.

Ever since Google launched Google.cn and rebranded to Guge in early 2006, it has not yet made any significant progress in gaining search market share and advertising revenues in China. On the other hand, search competitor Baidu has doubled its advertising revenue in Q1 2007 and finished off by leading China’s search market share in December 2006 in 5 verticals. Other factors contributing to Google China’s limited progress include its failure to offer its Gmail service on Google.cn and to provide online music. Google China CEO Kai-fu Lee did not mention whether Google will launch Gmail nor music search in China. However, Sina will definitely become the next major traffic partner to Google, besides portals Soso.com and 163.com.

Comments

2 Responses to “Google and Sina Ready To Compete Against Baidu?”

  1. Gordon Choi on Google and Sina « ChinaSearchAds.com on June 30th, 2007 10:00 am

    [...] Choi on Google and Sina Gordon Choi put up a post on the Google-Sina tie up.  His contention is that Baidu is attracting a great deal of resentment in China – in the same way [...]

  2. Google and Sina Ready To Compete Against Baidu? — Biography. writers and their biography on April 4th, 2008 10:17 am

    [...] was behind baidus 66.3% in December 2006. * In return, Sina will become paid search source: Google and Sina Ready To Compete Against Baidu?, PPC Blog by Gordon Choi – Effectively Managing [...]

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