Baidu is to China what Google is to the U.S. In other words, while Google has a stranglehold on the U.S. search market, it has nothing on Baidu in China. According to Analysys International, Baidu, China’s homegrown search engine, held a dominating 60% of the Chinese search market in December, compared to Google’s 26% and Yahoo! China’s 7%.
Google is making some headway into Baidu’s dominance. While Baidu’s market share remained relatively stagnant from the third to the fourth quarter of 2007, Google gained 2.2%. Google also unveiled a search deal with China Mobile. Given the size and growth of the Chinese mobile market, this could be an opportunity for Google to further establish itself in China.
From a worldwide perspective, however, Google still has bragging rights. In December, Google handled 41.3 billion search queries, or 62.4% of all queries worldwide, according to comScore qSearch. Yahoo! trailed at a distant second with 8.5 billion queries, or 12.8% of the total. Baidu was third on the list, handling 3.4 billion queries in December, or 5.2% of the worldwide total.
Microsoft (2.9%), NHN Corporation (2.4%), eBay (2.2%), Time Warner Network (1.6%), Ask Network (1.1%), Yandex (0.9%), and Alibaba.com Corporation (0.8%) rounded out the top 10 list.
Baidu recently relaunched its Japanese flavored search engine, making adjustments to its homepage and adding a blog search function.
Sources:
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm
?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=75166
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2018
http://www.searchviews.com/index.php/archives/
2008/01/and-third-place-in-global-search-goes-to.php
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