The majority of China’s rising netizen population in the last three years has been low-end users. Baidu has been quick to snap up the interest of this group through its various entertainment content search services. Also in its favor is the upgrade to its Web search efficiency that has begun to suck in more middle- and high-end users. As a result, Baidu has overtaken Google to become China’s top search engine.

Interestingly, the report notes that a Baidu/Google combination is very popular, making up 55 percent of those who use two or more search engines.

Localization rules

Yang with iResearch believes the obvious dominance Baidu has in Internet search in Chinese language and its future advantages lie in its indigenous nature. “Google has not yet realized its localization, and its Chinese version enjoys no technical advantages compared with other Chinese search engines,” he said.

Cultural and language impediments, which foreign search engines have never had to face before, are posing big challenges to their development in China. For example, Baidu points out on its website, “Applying avant-garde technology to the world’s most ancient and complex language is as challenging as it is exciting...We believe there are at least 38 ways of saying ‘I’ in Chinese...Pinpointing query in the Chinese language is an art rather than a science.”

According to Yang, there are also other problems facing foreign search engines, including information inaccuracy, slack database upgrading, longer response time and lower relevance of search results. These shortcomings have all held back the localization of the Chinese versions of foreign search engines.

Baidu has the largest Chinese language information database, with its 800 million Chinese language Web pages dwarfing Google’s 500 million. It is also recommended by most local users as being more accurate and comprehensive in providing Chinese language search results for the users.

“In China’s Internet search market, local search engines can provide Internet users with better search options, and they have already cultivated a fixed user group network and a user loyalty. For this reason, it’s not easy for the foreign companies to overpower their Chinese counterparts,” Yang concluded.