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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Mar. 31, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of Apr. 2, 2007

1324 - Apr. 5, 2007 - 7.11 AM EST

How is Google doing in China?

The search market in China encompasses a little over 105 million Web users. To this, add about 350 million mobile users, growing by approximately 57 million new users every year. In less than three years from now, it is expected that Internet users in China will outnumber U.S. users by at least 25 percent. Today, about 87 percent of the Chinese Internet audience uses search daily.

Globally, and given Internet search’s dominance of monetization and overall audience numbers, the competition for the top spot in China's search market is extremely active.

In China, the "big five" are, in order of importance: Baidu, Google, Yahoo, Sohu and Sina. Each of these five big search engines are fighting each other to be the single, leading provider of search in China. The two largest search players are currently Baidu and Google, and they account for about 87.8 percent of all searches, according to the 2006 CNNIC Search Survey.

Although it doesn’t show up in the main search rankings, Tencent (a leading Instant Messaging platform in China, with over 220 million active users) has been making significant progress into this huge market by licensing Google’s search apps two years ago. According to the 2006 CNNIC Search Survey, close to 80 percent of Internet searchers in China use multiple search engines and therein lies one of the more interesting dynamics of this market: Baidu (in the first spot) and Google (in second place) clearly lead the Chinese market in all aspects of search.

Overall, Yahoo has been struggling with its local partnering strategy, as it failed to take advantage of large acquisitions in China, including a search engine called 3721 and the much publicized Ali Baba. Yahoo's brand seems weaker compared to Google’s and other local players both as a result of its lack of focus and differentiation.

For its part, Sohu features mostly in MP-3 and video search, compared to its lagging ranking in Internet search. In china, Baidu is stronger than Google in market share, but since 2005, Google still managed to make some significant progress. It started to comply with local laws in China by filtering its results, and it’s the only one that informs users when it does so! Google also introduced its first music search, though its results point to music sites and not to downloadable music links, like its competitors. Read more...

1323 - Apr. 2, 2007 - 5.12 PM EST

Topix.net is now a Web 2.0 local news portal

News aggregator service Topix.com (previously known as Topix.net) has now transformed itself into a Web 2.0 local news portal.

A year and a half ago, the site added forums and, according to Topix, more than 1 million people posted 5.5 million comments, adding more than 30,000 comments a day.

Topix says many of the most passionate discussions were happening at the local level.

The company says “however, even with 50,000 news sources, there just wasn’t enough local news. What little news there was couldn’t be tuned finely enough with algorithms alone. So now we decided to open up our site, and give anyone the power to fleely discuss, edit and share the news that really matters to them.”

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

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