According to the Chinese IT market research firm Analysys International, Baidu still holds the lead among China’s search engines. In the first quarter of 2006 Baidu had 43.9 % of the search engine market share with Yahoo! China in second with a market share of 21.1 % and Google ranking third with a market share of 13.2 %.
Baidu recently launched a blog service, Baidu Space, an online blogging service similar to Microsoft’s MSN Spaces or Google’s Blogger. Baidu is competing with portals that offer blog services in China such as Sina, Sohu, BlogCN, Bokee.com, ChinaBlog.net and others in an already crowded market. A report by China’s Qinghua University, released last month, indicates China will have more than 60 million bloggers by the end of 2006. That’s more than half of the 111 milion internet users in China.
Sources: China Daily – TMC Net
