China Search Engine –
Behind the Great Wall

The China search engine market experienced an accelerating development in terms of its market size and value, powered by more than 300 million online users (exceeding the US in 2008) and Google’s strong China competitor, Baidu. Of the total Chinese internet users, 81.9% uses search engines, bringing the total Chinese search engine users close to 250M by the end of 2008. China has now a market size of 5.03 billion yuan.

In terms of volume, China search engine had 150 billion times of internet search in 2008, with the monthly volume exceeding 12.5 billion, comparing to the 11.5 billion times in US. In the last quarter of 2008, the search volume in China amounted to 46.8 billion times, an increase of 25.8 percent quarter on quarter.

The China online shopping market has also escalated to 53.15 billion yuan during the 1st quarter of 2008, as compared to 56.1 billion yuan during the whole year 2007.

The search engines that dominate the Chinese market are Baidu and Google (China). These 2 major search engines in China have 87.9% of the market share while the remaining 10% is split among Yahoo (China), MSN, Sogou, Sina, and other minor search engines.

China search engine market share based on daily usage

• Baidu - 63%
• Google (China) - 27%
• Sogou - 1%
• Yahoo (China) - 6%
• Others (including MSN, Sohu, Sina) - 2%