Study: Google losing users in China
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According to a survey, 62.1% of Chinese users turned to local favorite Baidu Inc. for search -- up from about 52% in 2005 -- and much of that growth came at Google's expense.
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The number of Internet users in China  hit 162 million at the end of June, a state information centre  said, with growth in the first six months of this year nearly  matching that for the whole of 2006.
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China hit 162 million Internet users in June, the fastest growth since 2004.
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Google&#39;s recently launched news service in China doesn&#39;t display results from Web sites blocked by that country&#39;s authorities, raising prickly questions
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The search outfit boasts of making all the information in the world just a click away. These days that doesn&#39;t seem to apply in China.
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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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Last week in China - An Open Letter to Google The last week has been quiet on the Chinese Internet front. Maybe it has something to do with nearing Chinese New Year is nearing. And speaking of that, what would a new year be without some good resolutions? Isaac Mao, a blog pioneer in China and co-founder [...]
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InfoWorld - Fewer new Internet users got online in China during 2004 than during the previous two years, even as the number of people accessing broadband connections continued to soar, according to survey results released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). At present there are 94 million Internet users in China, according to the report. That represents an increase of 18.2 percent, or 14.5 million new Internet users, since January 2004. That number represents the lowest number of new Chinese Internet users reported by CNNIC since January 2002. It reported annual increases of 20.4 million new Internet users in January 2004 and 22.6 million new users in January 2003, compared to an annual increase of 11.2 million new Internet users reported in January 2002. All four categories showed increases during 2004, but the rate of growth for broadband users far exceeded all of the other categories. The number of broadband users increased 146 percent from 17.4 million users in January 2004 to 42.8 million users. The category with the second-fastest growth rate was ISDN users, which increased 16.3 percent from 5.5 million users to 6.4 million users.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. users in the U.S. lost access to Google Web sites on Tuesday in a connectivity issue that lit up the blogosphere but whose causes remain unclear. An undetermined number of Google users that connect to the Internet via a specific service provider "experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time" on Tuesday, a Google spokesman said via e-mail. "Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP," the spokesman wrote. Postings in discussion groups and blogs seems to indicate the problem hit the northeastern part of the U.S. the hardest, specifically Boston, and that the ISP in question is Comcast Corp. The Google spokesman didn't specify which ISP caused the problem and a Comcast spokeswoman reached by phone could not confirm that her company had experienced a connectivity problem. (Grant Gross in Washington DC contributed with the story.)
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Any day now China will have more web users than the US, but the net has been tamed by Beijing's iron grip
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There were about 162 million internet users at the end of June 2007 according to the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) Yesterday the CNNIC released her latest report. Since 1997 they publish the results of their surveys each half year. This report shows that since the end of 2006, there are 25 million(18.25%) more netizens [...]
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By Jonathan Thaw and John Liu  Baidu.com, China's most-used Internet search engine, forecast first-quarter sales will grow at the slowest pace since the company went public, as competition from Google increases.
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(InfoWorld) - Google will do better in China, but don't look for the company to dominate the market anytime soon, the company's top executive said Thursday. "Although it does not appear we are number one in the market, it looks like we are now in a situation where we are quite competitive," Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and CEO, told investors during a conference call. Google hasÂ invested heavily in China,Â setting up R&D centersÂ and developing aÂ search engine that censorsÂ results that government officials aren't likely to approve of. But despite Google's best efforts and the hiring of former Microsoft executiveÂ Kai-fu LeeÂ to lead its Chinese operations, the company trails far behind local rival Baidu.com. Google is the sixth most-visited Web site in China, with 4.4 percent of respondents choosing the search engine as the site they visit most often, according to an IDC survey released earlier this year. By comparison, Baidu ranked third, with 11.2 percent of respondents saying they visit the Chinese search engine more than any other site. Baidu also has a strong lead over Google in China's online advertising market, with a 16.5 percent share of the market in 2006, IDC said. Baidu earned US$105.2 million from online ads in 2006, making it the number two player in the market behind Sina, which runs China's top Internet portal. Google China ranked sixth in the country's online advertising market, with revenue of $38.7 million and a 6.1 percent share of the market, IDC said. Despite trailing behind its main rival, Google is upbeat about its prospects in China. Speaking to investors on Thursday, Google CFO George Reyes said the company's growth rate in China was "healthy." Schmidt said Google has a strong team in China and offers Chinese search capabilities that match or exceed those from rivals. "It's a very good start and although we don't think that this will result in an immediate huge success, we think that the tenacity of Google ... will bring significant victories in China over the next few years," he said.
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Just in time for Halloween, Google&#39;s YouTube became available again in China Wednesday, two weeks after it was blocked.Although Chinese Internet regulators don&#39;t comment on why sites are blocked,&#160;YouTube&#39;s blocking&#160;seemed to be tied one or two events: the 17th Communist Party Congress, the Chinese Communist Party&#39;s most important meeting, held every five years; and the launching of YouTube&#39;s traditional language site in Taiwan, both during the same week in the middle of this month. The YouTube Taiwan site is also available in China.However, while YouTube can be viewed again, Blogspot is once again unavailable, one of several sites that see-saw between being allowed or prohibited. Although attempts to reach Blogspot&#39;s homepage rerouted to Blogger.com&#39;s simplified Chinese homepage, neither Blogspot owner Google&#39;s official blog nor the infamous Chinabounder blog -- which features the sexual exploits and political rantings of a foreign English teacher in Shanghai -- could be reached.Blocked throughout the recent changes&#160;is the English-language site of Wikipedia. Its Chinese-language site is&#160;almost always unavailable&#160;here.China regularly blocks access to Web sites that it finds objectionable, including those dealing with politically sensitive subjects such as the Falun Gong religious cult and independence for Taiwan and Tibet, along with some pornographic sites.&#160;
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Kujila writes &quot;According to a Chinese Reuters article, China has closed close to 1,600 &quot;Internet Bars&quot; (probably the equivalent of &#39;Internet Cafes&#39; stateside) and inflicted up to $12.
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China is expected to have more than 600 million cell phone users by 2010, state media said Wednesday.  The Xinhua News Agency, citing the Ministry of Information Industry, said the number of users this year should reach 520 million.
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The number of Internet users in China soared past 200 million in 2007, a new report from the country&#39;s quasi-government Internet overseer said Thursday.China&#39;s Internet population&#160;stood at 210 million at the end of last year, up 53 percent from the same time in 2006 when there were 137 million, the China Internet Network Information Centre said in its semi-annual report on Internet use here.That figure puts China just 5 million users away from becoming the world&#39;s largest wired nation -- and with only about 16 percent of the population online. At its current growth rate, China will become the world&#39;s top Internet market sometime in the next few months.The greatest growth came from users under 18 and over 30, CNNIC said. One of the most surprising statistics from the new report indicates that about 40 percent of users added over the last year, over 29 million, came from rural areas. Even in the January 2007 report, the vast majority of Chinese Netizens were based in major urban areas such as Beijing and Shanghai.Also surprising among the new results is that China&#39;s most popular Internet application is online music, used by 86.6 percent of those surveyed, followed by instant messaging with 81 percent. E-mail placed only fifth, with 56.5 percent using it.CNNIC&#39;s survey provides the most reliable information about Internet use in China, although its methodology is translucent at best. It does not reveal its sample size, nor does it reveal what consists of an Internet user except that the person used the Internet at least once in the month prior to when the survey was taken.While the new statistics may seem impressive, it highlights how Internet usage in the country still lags behind mobile phone use, and how even greater usage could be spurred by more access through wireless devices. &quot;China&#39;s admittedly impressive user statistics hide an important fact: only a fraction of those users have regular access to a PC,&quot; said David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based technology consultancy.Despite limited PC access for some users, Chinese Internet users have embraced the Internet as a means of expression. &quot;In addition to an increase in overall numbers, you also see a rise in the number of Netizens creating content on BBS and blogs, making Chinese Netizens some of the most active participants in the Web 2.0 phenomena in the world,&quot; said Sam Flemming, founder and CEO of CIC, an Internet word of mouth monitoring firm based in Shanghai.