China Online Search Request Volume Increases Steadily, Google and Baidu Hold 95% Market Share
According to consultancy agency iResearch, China’s 330+ Million netizens generated 203.38 billion search requests in 2009. That makes for a year-on-year increase of over 35%.
Around 63% of the market share is still owned by Chinese search giant Baidu.com, another 32% by Google. They total about 95% of the Chinese search market.
After hackers attacked Google’s servers in January, the company furiously disabled their search filters and threatened to possibly pull out of China. The case was huge in western as well as Chinese media. Oddly enough, after Google turned it’s filters back on without any explanation, there was basically no media coverage.
According to the New York Times, the attacks came from two Chinese elite schools: Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School. While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a major speach where she drew analogies to the Berlin Wall and the unfree Internet, the Chinese government denied any involvement and critisized it’s US counterpart for turning Google’s economy-related issue into a political one.
Baidu proactively censors search results in line with the governments media censorship regulations.
