statistics

China’s search engine market hit 5.5 billion RMB (approximately 867 million USD) in 2011 Q3, according to online market research firm iResearch.

The search revenue increased by 78% from the same period last year. This dramatic increase is due to a boom in Chinese e-commerce ad spend.

China Search Engine Market size and its evolution (by iChinaStock)

Still according to iResearch data, Baidu now holds nearly 78% market share by revenue of China search engine market while Google’s market share declined from 19% to 18% compared to the previous quarter.

IResearch data comes from search company financial reports and estimates from its own tracking systems.

Below is the full evolution of search engines' market share in China:

From beginning of 2010 when Google decided to redirect Chinese users to its Hong Kong website, Google has lost 11% market share while Baidu has gained 10% over the same period. As we mentioned before, Google’s loss is Baidu’s gain, but not only.

Indeed, other local search engines also benefit from Google’s decline. Sogou, a Chinese search engine powered by Sohu, and Tencent’s Soso have seen their market share increased over the past year. 

Other search engines only account for 0.4% of China’s search engine market. Read more about all the search engines in China.

What search engine do you use in China? Baidu, Google or another one? Do you know you can use both Baidu and Google through BaiGoogleDu?

There are now more than 196 million domain names in the world according to a new study released by Internet infrastructure firm VeriSign.

During Q2 2010, 3 million additional domain names have been registered. It's a 2% increase compared to Q1 2010 and a 7% increase compared to Q2 2009.

Most popular domain names are ".com" and ".net" which both account for more than 100 million of all TLDs.

China's ccTLD ".cn" is the sixth most popular with almost 8 million registrations due to heavy registration restrictions. 

This post contains market shares for search engines in the world and several countries including the US, China, Japan and South-Korea. Data provided by comScore is based on “expanded search” definition, which includes searches not only conducted on the core search engines.

Search engine market share - worldwide

Google Sites ranked as the top search site worldwide with 87.8 billion searches in December 2009, or almost 67 percent of the global search market. Yahoo! Sites ranked second globally with 9.4 billion searches, followed by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8.5 billion searches.

Microsoft Sites reached 4.1 billion searches, on the strength of its successful introduction of new search engine Bing. Russian search engine Yandex also achieved considerable gains, growing to 1.9 billion searches.

Search engine market share - US

In January 2009, Google Sites led with 11.7 billion searches, representing almost 59 percent of the US search market. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 3 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.2 billion) and AOL (781 million).

Search engine market share - Europe

In March 2008, Europeans conducted almost 25 billion searches. Google Sites holds the leading position with more than 19 billion searches conducted, representing 79 percent of the European search market. Google’s top position was followed by eBay, which accounted for 3.1 percent of European searches. Russian search portal Yandex ranked third with 2.2 percent search market share, slightly ahead of Yahoo! Sites at 2.0 percent and Microsoft Sites at 1.9 percent.

Search engine market share - China

The Chinese conducted almost 11 billion searches in July 2008. The leader of the market is the Chinese search engine Baidu, far ahead of Google (see our recent article showing that Google's loss is Baidu's gain in China). Other players such as Soso and Sogou try to gain market share but aren't very successful. 

Search engine market share - Japan

Yahoo! Sites led the search ranking in Japan with 3.5 billion searches in January 2009, followed by Google Sites with 2.6 billion searches and Rakuten with 153 million searches.

Search engine market share - South Korea

In April 2009, 3.4 billion searches were conducted in South Korea. NHN Corporation, which includes Naver.com, led the search market with 2.1 billion searches conducted on its sites (62 percent search market share), followed by Daum with 680 million searches (20 percent) and Google Sites with 251 million searches (7 percent).

If you have more up-to-date data about search engine market share, notably in Asian countries, feel free to share it with us.

Over 25% of Chinese Internet users shop online

According to the white paper on the Internet released by China's government (see our previous post China's Internet censorship will continue), Chinese online shopping population hit 100 million in 2009.

As the whole Chinese Internet population was estimated at 384 million people at the end of 2009, it means that more than one-quarter of people connected to the web actually shop online.

China's e-commerce growing fast

The paper states that 'E-commerce is undergoing rapid development', affirmation confirmed by the trade volume of e-commerce in China which surpassed 3.6 trillion yuan (approximatively $525 billion) in 2009, compared to 1.95 trillion yuan in 2008 (approximatively $284 billion).

More and more businesses are indeed using e-commerce in China: over 50% of large enterprises (30% of small and medium sized companiers) have established e-commerce systems.

Moreover, specialized e-commerce services are also taking shape to support the growth, with systems like digital authentication, e-payment and logistics gradually being formed.

New online retailers actors

China's ecommerce market is undergoing several movements after Taobao and Yahoo! Japan launched the world's largest ecommerce platform on June 1st. 

In addition, Japan’s largest online retailer Rakuten announced a joint venture with Baidu to launch an e-commerce platform in the second half of this year.