Google’s presence in the Chinese search engine market is not as prominent as the rest of the search engine world, ranking third behind Baidu and Yahoo!, according to fresh research released by Analysys International.

China’s leading search engine Baidu, holds the largest portion of search market share, garnering 43.9 percent of all search conducted in China in the first quarter of 2006. Yahoo! falls in second position with 21.1 percent, close to half of Baidu’s total search share, whilst Google slots in third significantly behind the top two, and accounting for only 13.2 percent of all searches conducted.

A total of RMB 303 million was spent on search engine marketing in China in the first quarter of 2006 (excluding search engine channel revenue which reached RMB 135 million), RMB 175 million of which was spent on pay per click, RMB 9 million on search engine advertising and RMB 120 million from real-name keywords advertising services.

Analysys International, a leading Internet based provider of business information and technology telecom (TMT) industries in China, says “The combination of search engine with e-commerce is drawing people’s attention…Google has advantages on multi-language advertising, such as Korean and Japanese adwords advertising. However, in major areas such as Guangdong, Jiangsu, Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang, Baidu is more favored by online marketing advertisers.”

It is interesting to note however, that there is somewhat a large discrepancy in search engine ranking results for the Chinese market. Whilst Analysys International claim Google to be ranked third with only 13 percent of the search share, a study also conducted by iResearch assert that Google is actually ranked second, accounting for 32.8 percent of the market (see Rene’s earlier article on Google selling its stake in Baidu). According to their results, Baidu holds 56.8 percent of the share and Yahoo! lags behind with less than 5 percent of the search share. A remarkable difference indeed. We will try and research these ranking results over the coming months so that we can provide you with authoritative data. Any suggestions are welcome!

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