Google back in China
Us Google-watchers thought we would drop an article on our blog to succinctly clarify the brief history and lingering issues between the PRC and Google.
2010 data suggests that mainland Chinese Internet users number close to 420 million eclipsing the US with about 240 million. Google and indeed all search vendors are likely to find the Chinese market increasingly attractive!
In 2006, Google launched its China-based search service with results subject to censorship by the Chinese government. Your search results announced as much at the bottom of each page! Then, three years later in March of 2009, the Chinese Government blocked access to Google’s YouTube site.
Frustrated, in March of this year, Google started redirecting searches to an alternate search site in Hong Kong to bypass PRC regulators. Hong Kong is not subject to the same censorship laws.
The Chinese Government responded by banning all Google search sites including Google Mobile. The ban was lifted a day later but Google, unwilling to cooperate with Chinese censors, closed its mainland search engine. Recently, a compromise was reached. China agreed to renew Google’s License and the latter promised to obey Chinese law.
Incidentally, Google is not the biggest search player in China and it continues to lose ground against first place rival Baidu, which reportedly indexes over 740 million pages. Now 10 years old, Baidu was the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index.
Posted by Felice Hunt on 27th July, 2010 | Comments | Trackbacks
Tags: Marketing Techniques, Social Media Business, Social Web, Google
The trackback URL for this page is http://www.asenz360.com/trackback?post=20274467
Trackbacks
There are no trackbacks for this post
There are no comments for this post
Post a Comment
HTML is not allowed in comments, http://... will be automatically linked.
