China search engine war: Google to surpass Baidu in five years?
According to multiple reports, Google has set up a five years plan to gain supremacy in the search engine industry. To do so, it will need to win market share against the old rival, Baidu.com. In the short term, Google will invest in social networking sites and companies in China, while expanding on its mobile deals.
I think Google has two main issues that needs to be addressed quite urgently:
1-Google.cn is NOT better than Baidu.
2-Baidu offers services that are better than Google’s ones, or that Google just cannot offer (I am talking MP3 search for instance).
On the other hand, the mobile internet sure is growing fast, but I don’t think that it really matters at this point where the country is still struggling with its 3G standard. I also don’t see how beating Baidu in the mobile internet business can help in the PC-side of search.
