Each of these five big search engines are fighting each other to be the single, leading provider of search in China. The two largest search players are currently Baidu and Google, and they account for about 87.8 percent of all searches, according to the 2006 CNNIC Search Survey.

Although it doesn’t show up in the main search rankings, Tencent (a leading Instant Messaging platform in China, with over 220 million active users) has been making significant progress into this huge market by licensing Google’s search apps two years ago. According to the 2006 CNNIC Search Survey, close to 80 percent of Internet searchers in China use multiple search engines and therein lies one of the more interesting dynamics of this market: Baidu (in the first spot) and Google (in second place) clearly lead the Chinese market in all aspects of search.

Overall, Yahoo has been struggling with its local partnering strategy, as it failed to take advantage of large acquisitions in China, including a search engine called 3721 and the much publicized Ali Baba. Yahoo's brand seems weaker compared to Google’s and other local players both as a result of its lack of focus and differentiation.

For its part, Sohu features mostly in MP-3 and video search, compared to its lagging ranking in Internet search. In china, Baidu is stronger than Google in market share, but since 2005, Google still managed to make some significant progress. It started to comply with local laws in China by filtering its results, and it’s the only one that informs users when it does so! Google also introduced its first music search, though its results point to music sites and not to downloadable music links, like its competitors.

Recently however, Google has beaten Baidu in terms of perceived quality. Recent numbers by Keynote Systems shows that among 1,200 Web users in China, Google outperformed all other contenders in 11 out of 13 factors measured. Most participants that ranked Google highest were actually using another search engine as their primary site for search. Google’s great scores weren't surprising, given that the three most important criteria for ranking search engines in users minds were:

1) A clean home page design
2) The overall quality of search results
3) The quality of image search results

This trend speaks highly for Google in terms of catching up to Baidu in the market share. However, Janelle Wu, who was formerly Senior V.P. at NetEase said “both Google and Yahoo could still further improve their government relations in a big way in China.”

Wu also mentioned that one of Baidu’s great strategic moves was hiring R&D experts from the U.S., while recruiting in China for sales talent.

Baidu is currently enjoying virtually double the market share in all types of search over Google. Last year, another study by CNNIC offered additional reasons for Baidu attracting a large user base, including Baidu’s well-liked Bulletin Boards and its responsiveness. The Chinese search leader also benefits from its wildly popular MP-3 search, which takes users directly to downloadable music.

Among all the players in China, the one to really watch is Tencent. Given its dominance in Instant Messaging and its overall success in entering new markets such as casual games, mobile chat and virtual goods, it has the potential to greatly enhance its influence in the large Chinese Internet market.

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Article by Aydin Senkut,
Source: Read/WriteWeb