Google Says They Won’t Ask For Help In China To Compete

Dec 22, 2006 at 9:03am ET by Barry Schwartz

In Google sticks to solo plans from the Shanghai Daily, Google said it won’t work with a local partner in China to gain marketshare. Google’s vice president of China operations, Kai-fu Lee said that they “have confidence in our current approach” in China.

Currently, Baidu has 50 percent share in China, compared to Google’s 16 percent share, according to one estimate. Baidu’s share is expected to increase, while Google is expected to remain flat.

Yahoo has made partnerships in China to try to expand their reach, with the Alibaba.com investment. Note that Google did announce a partnership deal with Taiwan’s Chunghwa yesterday.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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3 COMMENTS ON Google Says They Won’t Ask For Help In China To Compete

Ian McAnerin, December 22nd, 2006 at 11:32 am ET:

This is good timing. Yesterday, I wrote an article in my blog about exactly this issue, though from a different viewpoint:

http://mcanerin.blogspot.com/2006/12/china-msn-yahoo-and-ebay-give-up-is.html

Based on the my analysis then, I fully expected this, and I believe it’s also the wrong direction.

Ian

David Temple, December 23rd, 2006 at 2:10 am ET:

Nice catch Barry. Google just can’t get it right in China no matter what they do. They made a smart move getting Kai Fu Lee from Microsoft, although they had to go to court on that one. Then Google started stumbling. They changed their name to Gu Ge which went over like a lead balloon, got sued by their and most recently lost the vp or co president Johnny Chou. It will be interesting to see how they make up ground, but I don’t see it happening.

Rose Water, December 27th, 2006 at 2:14 pm ET:

One thing google could beat baidu on is relevance and quality: baidu puts paid results in the searches, which leads to distrust. Google is always adamant about having “these results are sponsored” everywhere their ads reach.

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