Google may be trailing Chinese search leader Baidu.com by a wide margin, but the worldwide search leader is redoubling its efforts to compete in both China and Asia by focusing on the nascent mobile
search market. Google expects to process more local Web search queries from mobile phone than computers in Asia by 2011. It's a fast-growing and potentially huge market, said Google's China President
Lee Kai-Fu. "In some quarters, our mobile traffic will double, whereas it will take perhaps a year to double on the PC side," he said. After gaining exclusive rights to process queries from China
Mobile Ltd., the world's biggest phone company by users, Google now leads Beijing-based Baidu.com in mobile search. However, overall, Google still earns less than half the ad revenue of Baidu.com in
China. At last count, Baidu's market share was 60 percent, up 2 percent from a year earlier, compared to Google, which had a market share of 26 percent, up 17 percent from the year before.
"Google has looked for newer avenues due to the strength of Baidu's position on the Internet side," said Jim W. Oberweis, president of Oberweis Asset Management Inc. in Lisle, Illinois, which invests
in Baidu. "Both Internet-based search as well as mobile search are large potential markets," he said.
Read the whole story at Bloomberg News »
