Google Expands With China Mobile Hook-Up
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By de Jonquieres, Julian  CHINA Google and China Mobile are to cooperate on mobile search facilities as both continue their diversification of services in the mainland.
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Google says it's grappling with an  unusual challenge in China's Internet market -- how to cater to  masses of Web surfers who go online for the first time via  mobile devices, rather than migrating from PCs.
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According to Google, current Keyhole users will benefit from the expanded resources and operational scale made possible by the company&#39;s integration into Google.
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(InfoWorld) - Google may be steadilyÂ losing market shareÂ in China to rival Baidu.com, but the company is not giving up, adding several new features to its Google.cn search engine, including some capabilities that are not available on Google.com. The Google.cn search engine was launched by Google in early 2006. The search engine, whichÂ culls search resultsÂ that might offend the Chinese government's censors, was created to help Google grow faster in China, where the company's main search engine, Google.com, is sometimes slow or unavailable. There was just one problem with this strategy: most of Google's Chinese users still prefer to use Google.com, which also offers the ability to search the Web in Chinese, instead of Google.cn. That hasn't discouraged Google, which in recent months has steadily added new features to Google.cn, such as the ability to search Chinese Web sites using Pinyin, a romanization system for characters that allows Chinese words to be spelled out using the Roman alphabet. That capability, already available from Baidu, allows users to search using Chinese without having to switch from English to Chinese input systems. Searching on Google.cn for 'zhong guo,' which means 'China,' still returns a list of results containing these words. But like Baidu, the Web site also asks if you want to search for 'China' using Chinese characters. Clicking on that link brings a user to another page of results for the Chinese characters 'zhong guo,' which also includes links to a couple of news stories. In addition to allowing users to search for Pinyin, Google.cn now has an auto-complete compatibility, introduced in January, similar to the company's Google Suggest service. This feature suggests possible search terms on Google.cn when letters or characters are entered -- a feature that you won't find on Baidu or the main Google.com search engine. Typing 'zho' into the search field on Google.cn now yields a list of search terms in Chinese characters, including 'China Mobile,' 'Bank of China,' and 'China maps,' among others, along with the number of results available for each term. Ironically, the top search result on Google.cn for 'China maps' is Sougou Map Search, a service offered by rival Sohu.com Inc., that competes with Google.cn's own localized map service, which was launched earlier this month. Whether the addition of these features will help reverse Google's fortunes in China remains to be seen. The search engine's popularity has fallen steadily over the last year, even among the older and more affluent Internet users that the company once considered its strongest base. (Steven Schwankert, in Beijing, contributed to this story.)
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Google Inc.  said on  Tuesday that the company has begun offering mobile phone users  in more than 30 major U.S. cities the capacity to view highway  maps with "live" traffic data.
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Microsoft Expanding Live Search into China Under a deal with China Telecom, Microsoft will be serving a Chinese version of Live Search to China Telecom&#8217;s 25 million broadband customers.  The People&#8217;s Daily Online reports: Microsoft has been looking for an opportunity to get into the search market since Baidu.com, Yahoo! and Google joined. The launch of Live [...]
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Google and SINA team up in a Chinese search partnership.
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Meet the 400-pound gorilla of Chinese wireless add-ons.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is testing a book search service in China that allows users to search and read the full text of books. The trial Web site, which went live on March 2, is the latest addition to Google's Chinese search engine, Google.cn. As part of ongoing efforts toÂ attract more Chinese Internet usersÂ to Google.cn, which limits search results to satisfy Chinese government censors, the company has beenÂ adding more features to the site. A posting on Google's Chinese blog said the company has so far scanned 1 millionÂ books from around the world into its index, but relatively few Chinese books are available. "In China, this mission has just started, we still have a long way to go," the blog said. In addition to allowing users to search the text of indexed books, the book-search service provides links to online book sellers that sell the book. Users can also use Google's revamped and recently relaunched Chinese map service to find the address and location of nearby bookstores, the blog said. In the future, the search engine may also be able to tell users if a bookstore has a particular book in stock, it said. Google has been working on the Chinese book search service since the middle of last year. At that time, Chinese media reported the company had struck deals with four publishers to scan their books for the search engine.
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Google is experimenting with a new search service for mobile devices based on text messaging, also known as "short messaging service" (SMS), as the company reaches out to the wireless world.
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Modern technologies update Chinese traditions as billions of text messages zing phone to phone.
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Google will come out in mid-2008 with a mobile phone platform that incorporates a variety of Google online services and lets outside developers create applications, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.The goal is to make Google applications and services as easily accessible on mobile phones as PCs, so that the company can extend its advertising business to cell phones and other wireless devices. Google may announce its mobile platform within weeks, according to the Journal.The Journal&#39;s article, based on anonymous sources, is the latest of multiple reports over the past six months or so about Google&#39;s plans for the mobile market.Although at some point it was speculated that Google might be involved in the actual&#160;manufacturing of phone hardware, that rumor is now discredited, as Google is expected to focus on developing mobile software.For Google, it&#39;s critical to replicate on mobile phones the success it has had on PC-based online advertising. After years of unfulfilled promises, mobile advertising will boom in coming years, as people spend more time using the Internet via their cell phones.The Kelsey Group recently forecast that mobile search and display advertising in the U.S. will hit $33.2 million this year and grow at a compound annual rate of 112 percent through 2012, when it will total $1.4 billion.Kelsey Group also expects the number of mobile Internet users to grow at a 20 percent compound annual clip in the U.S. through 2012, when there will be almost 92 million people going online via their cell phones.Worldwide, mobile ad spending is expected to reach $1.5 billion this year and grow to $11.3 billion by 2011, according to market researcher Informa Telecoms &amp; Media.Google is far from alone in its interest at pursuing this emerging opportunity in the mobile market, where all major telecom, online publishing and Internet players are jockeying for position.Of course, delivering online services and applications via mobile phones isn&#39;t as straightforward as doing it via PCs. In the mobile market, providers of online applications often have to strike up deals and partnerships with handset makers and wireless carriers.In a recent interview with the IDG News Service, Marissa Mayer, Google&#39;s vice president of Search Products &amp; User Experience,&#160;acknowledged there are specific challenges&#160;to bringing Google services to cell-phone subscribers.&quot;The mobile space is very complicated,&quot; she said.Google has pursued various avenues for making its search engines and other services available via cell phones. It has adapted Google Web sites for mobile browsers, developed mobile applications people can download themselves, as well as preloaded Google software in handsets via formal partnerships with mobile industry players.&#160;
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Users can now access search engine from their cell phones.
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(InfoWorld) - Google will open a research and development center in Shanghai, stepping up its effort to build a bigger search business in China. Google hasÂ struggled in ChinaÂ to create the dominance it enjoys elsewhere in the world. It took 19 percent of the country's search market revenue in the first quarter, compared with 57 percent for market leader Baidu.com, according to Analysys International, a telecom research and consulting company. A spokeswoman for Google in China, Marsha Wang, confirmed the plans for an R&D lab Friday. She declined to say how many people it will employ or provide other details. Google and its U.S. rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft, haveÂ faced political difficulties in China, for agreeing to censor search results. In addition, their services are sometimes hard to access from inside the country. Yahoo's Flickr division said this week that its service was being blocked in China. Â
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Virgin Group today announced plans to expand its mobile phone services to China in a $300m (Â£154m) joint venture with a Chinese company.
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Internet search giant Google promises "faster, more relevant results" with its new mobile service.
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Google Inc. will open a research and development center in Shanghai, stepping up its effort to build a bigger search business in China.