In a bid to gain market share on the dominant search company in China, Baidu, Google (GOOG) has partnered with one of China's largest portals, Sina. Google will power Sina's search, while in exchange, will put its Adsense on the pages of Sina.
George Chu, China internet analyst, UBS: “The deal with Sina is [Google’s] largest [in China] so far and will increase Google’s market share in search traffics and search revenues. Both Google and Baidu are competing to sign up smaller websites for their traffic. Advertisers may be less willing to pay a higher keyword price at Baidu now that Google is a more creditable competitor.”
Baidu not only has the key share of the Chinese search market share at 55 percent, but also overtook Sina's former lead in the online ad space earlier this year.
It seems that news content from Sina will also be able to be more readily accessed on Google News and search results as part of the deal.
Google's share in the Chinese market is 21.7 percent as of April 2007.
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