Results of a survey on China Internet search engine market share conducted by Beijing-based China IntelliConsulting were announced Wednesday, painting a grim picture for Google’s prospects in China.
The Mountain View, California-based Google has lost significant share in the three largest Chinese markets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, while Beijing-based Baidu has gained substantial ground and a commanding market share lead.
In Beijing, the only city for which detailed results were made available, Baidu’s market share rose by 13 percent from one year ago to 65.4 percent, the survey showed. Google fell by 12.3 percent, from 32.9 percent to 20.6 percent.
Peter Lü, managing partner of IntelliConsulting, who is also a senior research advisor to the state-run China Network Information Center (CNNIC) and author of CNNIC’s previous search market reports, said that the extent of Google’s erosion indicated by his survey’s findings surprised him
Mr. Lü said that results in the other cities reflected trends shown in Beijing as well, with Google’s share falling by more than 10 percent and Baidu’s gains exceeding 10 percent.
Cold Comfort
While Google could take some comfort in last year’s CNNIC survey, which showed the U.S. search giant with a lead over its Chinese rival in non-student users, advanced degree holders, and wealthier netizens, Baidu has grabbed market share to overtake Google in these sectors as well. Baidu now has a 55.3 percent share among non-student users in Beijing, compared with Google’s 26.1 percent. And Google has fallen to 43.7 percent of “high-end” users, said Mr. Lü.
“Baidu is starting to eat into Google’s core user base, dislodging Google’s high-end user market lead,” Mr. Lü said.
Questions on overall satisfaction with major search providers revealed that users in China are “unhappy about the speed of Google,” said Mr. Lü, and with penalty time-outs that Chinese ISPs impose on users when they search for sensitive search terms.
These issues prompted Google to launch a China-hosted version of its site at Google.cn, drawing fire from free speech advocates and members of the U.S. Congress. But according to Mr. Lü, “only about 3 percent of Google users in China are using the Google.cn website. Most are using Google.com,” he said, referring to the U.S.-hosted, uncensored version.
He found that 20.1 percent of respondents said that they had switched from Google as a main search provider in the last year, and of those, 88.9 percent now use Baidu preferentially.
Ruffled by Results
Google is not the only search provider likely to be ruffled by the results: the search engines of portals Sina and Sohu both saw their market share shrink to 3.5 and 3.4 percent, respectively, while Zhongsou.com, which has been pushing its integrated search desktop Internet gateway aggressively in the last year, hardly even registered in the survey results.
Besides Baidu, only Yahoo China made any measurable gains, with a 1.7 percent increase to 5.4 percent market share.
The survey, based on 1,250 interviews with randomly selected Internet users in each of the three cities, was conducted in August.
Mr. Lü said he plans to release results of survey questions about click fraud and the ability of Chinese Internet users to distinguish between paid search results and “natural” search results.
“Baidu makes no distinction between paid search and natural search results,” said Mr. Lü. “We wanted to know how many people clicked advertisements before they could differentiate between click and natural results. Can they tell the difference? And if they can, do they click anyway?”
Top-line results for Guangzhou and Shanghai will be released in coming weeks, said Mr. Lü, with the full report on those cities only available commercially in English in approximately three weeks, he said.
Contact the writer:KKuo@RedHerring.com
del.icio.us
Digg this
Slash it