Why has China's largest search engine Baidu three times the market share in China compared to worldwide leader Google? The question has been asked in different ways for many foreign products trying to enter the China market, but for the search behavior of internet users there is now the beginning of a – rather interesting – explanation.
Eye-tracking research comparing Google users and Baidu users shows that both have different ways of looking at the search pages and search results, reports about research shows. Google users follow the classic pattern where they start at the top-left corner of the search page and 70 percent would focus on the first two search results.
Baidu-users on the other hand lack that focus, only 45 percent clicks on the top-left results, while the rest would scroll down and explore more of the other results. They also spend more time for their searches, 55 seconds, compared to 30 seconds for Google.
A few reasons for those differences come to my mind.
First, the tendency of looking for the most important information in the top-left corner is the behavior of a traditional newspaper reader. That conditioning of reading patterns did not change very easy even when people go online and in a response many (Western) websites might actually follow the way their users look at pages. But in China that is different. Because the Baidu-users compared to Google-users tend to be a bit younger and better educated, they might have been less often conditioned as newspaper readers.
Secondly, there is the much undervalued "mahjong-effect". This most-played game by Chinese is an excellent training in grabbing fast chances in a fast-changing playing field, where Western values like cherishing long-term strategies, branding and a secure playing ground. For the Chinese they matter less. Chinese expect to find more opportunities, so they scroll more, take more time to look for those opportunities. That behavior is prevalent in how people behave in traffic, in business, in social life, so it seems only logical they behave like that online too.
The research itself comes with other assumptions, based on the differences between English and Chinese, also rather valuable observations.
The whole white paper by research company enquiro can be downloaded here.
1 comment:
Another reason, I think, is that baidu has the music search service, while google doesn't. I search all but music through Google, and when I am searching music through Baidu, I usu. spend more time wandering from one page to another looking for music I want. Besides all the above reasons, another one reason should also be taken into account. On the first pages of Baidu serach results, they gives ads. To a serious Internet user, ads will be left out. while google gives their ads on the right of the pages.
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