p2pnet - rss feed: Google China business search
p2p news / p2pnet:- Google is losing market share in China to its biggest Chinese rival. What’s the name of the rival search engine?
That’s a Washington Post daily trivia question with the answer on the right.
“A survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Internet Network Information Center, reported that Baidu.com Inc. has boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent,” it goes on. “Google Inc.’s share was at 33 percent, as the American Internet search engine kept its customer base steady while the overall market grew, said the survey, seen Tuesday on CNNIC’s Web site.”
You can get a .pdf of the report here.
Now, “Google has launched a beta version of a service that allows Chinese web surfers to search for businesses in their local area, according to reports,” says ZDNet UK. “The service, called Google Bendi, offers similar features to Google Local, which was launched in the US last year.”
The Chinese service provides information about businesses in more than 170 Chinese cities, says ZDNet, quoting MacWorld.
China is a massive market but firms such as Google have a battle on their hands if they want to dominate it and, “Last week, Google said it was concerned that Microsoft’s attempts to prevent a former employee join the search giant could deter Chinese students from working at Google,” says ZDNet.
Google was castigated when it was revealed it had been censoring news from within mainland China by excluding certain sites, one of them being The Epoch Times.
At the time, a Google spokeswoman told p2pnet, “to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons”. In a blog, Google says losing a “fractional” number is, “better than having a service that is not available at all”.
The “fractional” number is 2% which, says Bil Xia, whose DynaWeb free proxy network built to circumvent internet blocking in China unveiled the situation, is hardly insignificant, particularly since those sites could easily be the most important, a view based on the fact it was deemed necessary to ‘block’ them in the first place.
Somthing you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
ZDNet UK - Google trials Chinese business search site, September 5, 2005
censoring news - Google China censorship: more, October 1, 2004
The Epoch Times - Google blocks The Epoch Times, October 4, 2004
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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
