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Google's Chinese Ambition

Though Google is more like David to Baidu's Goliath in China, the search giant's top brass, including CEO Eric Schmidt and Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, have been quite public about the company's goals for snagging more of China's search market share.

This week, for example, Lee reaffirmed the search giant's naked ambition at the Boao Forum for Asia. "Certainly, we would like to aspire to be a market leader in five years," Lee said.

And a look into the latest stats (from Beijing research firm Analysys International) shows that Google's share of search revenue in China was up to 26% in the fourth quarter of '07--nearly 10 percentage points higher than the previous year. In contrast, Baidu's year-over-year share only grew by 2 percentage points, to 60%.

Still, Lee acknowledged that Google faces an uphill battle. "Gaining share against a well-established, supermajority competitor is a difficult proposition because there is a certain critical mass, economy of scale and word-of-mouth effect that one has to overcome," he said.

Read the whole story at Silicon Alley Insider »

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