In the west we often hear how Google owns “this” percentage of the market, Baidu owns “that”, and so on – but what do these numbers really mean? Well the truth is that search engines are not yet that relevant in Chinese internet. The world of portals still dominates this land and in the country where creating content is cheap, it seems like this will persist for awhile longer. Why is that? For one, web sites are just not that search engine friendly. Sites small and big are covered with flying ads that, it would seem, should make one’s browsing experience a pain – not quite; actually, navigating through Chinese ads is much more “soothing” then skipping through pages of cryptic text! Now, wherever this leads one to the right results that’s a different question, however people that are concerned with the right results don’t go to “just web sites”, they go to BBS (Chinese equivalent of Forums).

Then there is a question of market dominance. Fact of the matter is that big China Internet leaders of today got there not through such trivial and clear practices. For example, even now it is quite common (although much less so) to see big ISPs changing their domain entries to redirect traffic from certain popular nonprofit sites to some commercial portals. So when a company like Google comes to this industry at the time when things are a bit more reliable, they have to start wherever others have been 4 years before - and they have to do it in the clear (or so about)!

Finally, search engines just don’t return relevant results here. Whereas in the west, there exists enough balance between big giants and little “educational” sites, here it’s just not the case. One may experience this through a simple search in Baidu; the first results will not come from Tsinghua (Stanford of China) or some famous blogger, they will come from Baidu’s own forums (Baidu Zhidao). Is it not that a function of a portal? Of course who knows, in 5 years Google in U.S. might just be a portal!

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