Rumored for some time, Google is now officially providing results for Chinese search engine Soso.com.
Spotted first by Search Engine Journal, the Google logo is now present in Soso.com search results, and joins 163.com in Google’s quest to conquer China.
It has been a difficult market for Google from the beginning. The ethical questions in relation to censorship caused Google to hold back on services such as gmail for Google.cn whilst the NASDAQ listed Baidu.com continued to dominate the local search market.
As of April, Baidu’s market share is reminiscent of Google’s domination in other nations, Baidu having 55% search market share in China to Google’s 21.7%.
Google’s traditional foe Yahoo is only just on the radar in China. Although rated in a 2006 market share report as being China’s No. 3 search engine, market share as of June 2006 was a low 5.7%. If Alexa data can be trusted, Yahoo.cn has since slipped to 7th place on traffic behind Baidu.com, 163.com (powered by Google, 2), Sohu.com (3), Google.cn (4), SoSo.com (powered by Google, 5) and Sina.com (6). It should be noted that a number of sites, such as Sina.com compete not only in search but services as well, Sina.com being best known in the West for offering a blogging platform.
Google’s China partners Soso.com and 163.com also use Google’s Adwords advertising platform. Google previously held a 2.6% stake in Baidu.com which it sold in 2006.
The importance of China to Google should not be underestimated. China has around 150 million people online and is expected to have more broadband users than the United States in the next 12-24 months.
The whole China-censorship ethical question doesn’t bother me in the least. In the years prior to Yahoo and Google doing business there, nowhere near as many people talked about China’s censorship problem as they do now.
You do business, you do business under the rules where you operate, and you get on with it. Nothing is better for a place like China than more exposure to the outside world. Google and Yahoo are right to be there regardless of the government’s idiocy.
Anyway good luck to them both over there.
Google Will help China Dominate and China will help Google to dominate.
soso logo have google colors!!!
I worked as an UI design intern in SOSO’s mother company “Tencent” last summer.
Once I asked their officials about the similarity in search results between SOSO.com & Google.cn, they replied that it’s true Google is providing SOSO a part of their database.
I questioned further in regard to whether this is a business secret, they said it’s an open-secret, and were not intended to hide it from public.
Noted that what google provided SOSO was just a very slim slice of its chinese database. Now with this official logo embed, I expect SOSO get a better share of google’s “censored” database.
SOSO isn’t close to popular in China, intergration between Tencent’s famous QQ (IM product) and SOSO.com aren’t complete, this collaboration still have a long way to go.
It wouldn’t surprise me if that 144 million figure was way higher.
From READWRITEWEB:
“Tencent’s instant messaging service platform, officially launched in Feb 1999 and announced in its 2006 Q3 report that it has 221.4 million active users. What’s more, the total registered user accounts has climbed to 572.3 million!”
I don’t know many people here in China who use yahoo as their search engine. Most of my friends all rely on either google.cn or baidu.com for searching.
But thinging of these sites as portals, that’s when sina.com and 163.com seem to excel. Despite censorship, people seem quite happy with those.