Baidu.com Becomes Second Largest Search Engine: Does Local Indian Search Players Hold the Same Potential
Chinadaily.com.cn has reported that Baidu, China’s leading search engine has larger market share in the global search niche than Yahoo and MSN. This effectively makes it the second largest search engine in the world behind Google. The report mentions Comscore data to stake claim of the position.
According to the report, Comscore’s data show that Google dominates the global search activities, holding 68.9 percent of the world’s search engine market. Market shares of Yahoo! and Microsoft come to 6.5 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively. Baidu now has a share to the tune of 6.9% of global searches according to the latest Comscore data.
Though we couldn’t add Yahoo search because of the system’s inherent limitations, the Alexa analysis also showed a similar number for Baidu and Bing. It stood at around 6.5% while Bing had around 2.5% of global search traffic. It was also interesting to note that Baidu clearly dominates the Chinese geography and performs even better than what Google does Globally. According to Comscore it has more 75% of the marketshare in China and the Alexa results show that the site is amongst the top players in other South East Asian countries and even in USA it is the top 400 websites.
What worked or still works in Baidu’s favour is the humungous chinese population and the fact that Chinese language takes predomincance over others languages like English unlike in India. This means it attracts mandarin speaking populace from all over the world thus giving it a more global appeal. However, what drives its adoption even more in China where Google is actually slipping down is something I don’t have an answer to. It can very well be that they provide better more intuitve and culture friendly results. Natural language is a very big influence on how data is sought and perhaps that’s where the difference really lies.
Indian Search Players
Does this mean there is more scope for Indian search players, the ones’ who focus on local content and regional languages?
I have my doubts for two reasons:
- English is still the predominant workplace language, therefore information sought will also be predominantly in English. On the other hand the Global Indian Diaspora for all their culture love will probably never search in their native tongue which many probably won’t know how.
- That leaves scope only for those who access regional language content. Here again, the biggest problem India faces is that there is no one strong national language. Hindi is obviously the national language and for all practical purpose the alternative for English. However, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that with numerous regional languages people are more likely to search for info in the local language and not the national one. And in that case the volumes that they will generate probably won’t be enough to bring any significant oppportunity.
So despite the big population none of the Indian search players can reach the level of a Baidu.com.
It is interesting to note that this news comes in the wake of Yahoo and MSN tying up to take on Google’s invincibility in the global search market. On many counts though they wouldn’t be bothered the least considering Baidu has a targeted niche and it probably can never compete against a stronger Yahoo/MSN and Google globally. So the ffight is still on for the 3rd and 4th players to take on the leader and increase their share of the pie.
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The problem India has not many people willing to go beyond google.
Do you prefer Reebok or Bata ?
It is very difficult for an Indian company to prove that they are better than google.
Microsoft and yahoo had been trying for years, they still could not do it.
Hi
Do we really need another Google? For content based search engine Google is best.We need different kinds of Search Engines. We need theme based search engines. Like a search engine for medical content, search engine for enginnering content, search engine for shoppers etc.
@vinay
Bata by the way is a European company.. anyway I get your point
@Rajeev
I agree with you..