xinhua

World's largest mobile phone operator China Mobile and China's official news agency Xinhua agreed yesterday to set up a search engine.

China Mobile and Xinhua enter China’s search market

The joint venture will focus on creating a search engine for the Chinese market. 

That could be notably very interesting for search on mobile Internet since China Mobile has more than 554 million subscribers. 

Founded in 1931, Xinhua is China's official news agency and an international provider of multimedia news and information services.

China Mobile has already successfully partnered with Xinhua to provide mobile news and audio-visual programs to customers.

Fierce competition in China’s search market

Baidu, which would like to expand overseas, dominates the world's biggest online market with a market share of 71%, according to research firm Analysys International.

Ranking second, Google had a market share of 24% in Q2, falling from 31% in Q1. The US search company lost share against its Chinese rival after issues with Beijing over filtering search results. 

In March, Google said it would no longer filter its Chinese search engine results but re-route mainland users to its site in Hong Kong. After China's government renew Google's license in China, things seem to have cooled down.

Other main search engines include Sogou (owned by Sohu and now Alibaba), Tencent's Soso, Yahoo! China and Microsoft's Bing.

China's search market was worth 2.67 billion yuan (393 million dollars) in Q2, up 48% year on year. The number of Internet users in China hit 420 million last month.