The Times (via Cnet) Does the Big Baidu Story
September 17, 2006
In case you missed it, here's the NYT Sunday story (written by a Cnet staffer) on Baidu, the "Chinese Google." Recall we covered this earlier in the week here.
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Comments
The article states that no other search engine is "clobbering Yahoo and Google in its home market", yet Google has single-digit share in Korea, with Naver taking around 65 percent, sans firewall.
The difference may be cultural, as Koreans hate anonymity online (they've passed laws requiring verifiable ID's for websites/blogs), and they prefer to get recommendations from humans rather than algorithmic rankings.
Hmm, maybe the "special" nature of the market is summed up nicely by these paragraphs in the piece. Apparently the analyst quoted doesn't see how having a totalitarian government supporting you helps with market share:
In exchange for letting censors oversee its Web site, Baidu has sealed its dominance with support from the Chinese government, which regularly blocks Google here and imposes strict rules and censorship on other foreign Internet companies.
In addition, analysts say, entrepreneurs in China have a knack for pummeling American Internet giants. "The globally dominant U.S. Internet companies have failed to take the No. 1 market share position in any category," says Jason D. Brueschke, a Citigroup analyst, of the Chinese market. "And they came with more money and major brand names. And so there's something fundamentally different about this market."
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