How Google lost China - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Google's effort to enter China's censored search market has failed a second time, first in China itself, now because of opposition in the US and Google staff. Former communication director Kaiser Kuo at China's leading search engine Baidu looks back at how the internet company failed at its first move back in 2006, for the MIT Technology Review.

The MIT Technology Review:

Central to that decision by Google leadership was a bet that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese users and nudge the Chinese internet toward greater openness. 

At first, (in 2006) Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators. 

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’” Google hadn’t asked the government for permission before implementing the notice but wasn’t ordered to remove it. The company’s global prestige and technical expertise gave it leverage. China might be a promising market, but it was still dependent on Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and knowledge. 

Google wanted to be in China, the thinking went, but China needed Google... 

The Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown. 

“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.” 

But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Six months earlier, following riots in Xinjiang, the government had blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in one fell swoop, fortifying the “Great Firewall.” The government was making a bet: China and its technology sector did not need Google search to succeed.

More at the MIT Technology Review.

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Google keeps on losing market share

Google keeps on losing market share to the domestic search engine Baidu, reports China Web2.0 review based on a new report by CNNIC. Baidu now get 74.5% of the Chinese internet users as primary users of their search engine, compared to 62% last year.
That can be explained by the fast growth of the internet by 30 percent over last year, when new Chinese users will most likely use a local heavy weight in stead of a foreign less known search engine. More troublesome is that Baidu is also winning in the high-end users. Google get 22.11 percent of the high-end users in the first-tier cities, but only 5 percent in the third tier cities.

CCTV says it caught Baidu cheating

China's central TV CCTV said it has now proof for rumors going around in the market for a long time: the largest domestic search engine Baidu.com sells its search results for money. Even more, it sells top positions to companies who cheat their customers, reports China Tech News.

Since it only unveils what many users already expected, the fall-out of this scandal might be limited.

Legal experts quoted in local media say that there is not a law to regulate the behavior of the search engine service providers, so the only thing they can do is to suggest consumers not to rely too much on the search results of those search ngines.

Tencent goes into search

The succesful Shenzhen-based IT-company Tencent is now moving into the search business, reports China Tech News. The company is said to have bought in April the domain name wenwen.com ("Ask a question") for 80,000 rmb.
Tencent started off as an IM-company with its popular QQ and has used its over 200 million user accounts to successfully take on weblog hosting, video hosting and now moves into search, where Baidu and Google are still the number one or two.

Update: China Web2.0 review has more details.

The traffic of this weblog

I just had a look at the traffic figures to this weblog over April and I'm stunned. I knew already that traffic was going up but I have never seen it grow that fast. There are huge differences though in the different ways people read this blog.
The number of RSS-readers has been rather stable, slightly under 2,000. The number of visitors on the other hand went up 20 percent, to almost 60,000 visitors, compared with March. The biggest jump is in the number of unique visitors that went up 50 percent, to almost 30,000, compared with March. Compared with February the jump is even more remarkable and more than doubled.
That probably means that the number of incidental readers goes up faster than the number of regular readers. Search engines seem to have an easier job in finding this weblog, and I see that the number of this for specific articles (yes, porn and sex are doing pretty well, thank you) has been climbing rather fast. That might be due to the revamp of the lay-out of the China Herald, but could also independently mean that the search engines are getting better.