Baidu has virtually copied Google's clean-screen look, but the rest of the Baidu game plan is original. It plays to nationalist advantage by attacking Google as a foreign invader. It promotes itself in such splashy ways as hanging a huge neon sign on the banks of the Pearl River in Shanghai. And it has flourished by aggressively marketing itself in ways verboten at Google: Baidu lets advertisers pay for placement in its search results.

The formula is working. Despite a big marketing push from Google over the past year, Baidu is the first choice of 62 percent of Chinese users, an increase of 15 percentage points from 2005. Google's share dropped eight percentage points to 25 percent, a rare setback.

If Baidu keeps winning, local players elsewhere might copy Baidu's tactics, disrupting Google's plan to expand globally. The battle for China shows the obstacles that Google faces as it seeks to expand in the Internet economy. Click by click, Google has helped transform the Internet from an entertainment medium into an engine for the new economy. With a stock price that briefly topped $500 late last month, up from its $85 initial public offering two years ago, Google also has become one of the hottest investments of modern times.

China is Google's biggest and highest-profile foreign market. It's also the most competitive and perilous. The intense politics and pressure tripped up Google in an image-tarnishing deal under which the company gave in to Chinese censors in exchange for market access.

Google says it's too early to draw any conclusions about its competition with Baidu. "We're in sort of inning one of a nine-inning game," said Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Google's vice president for Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations.

Google is recharging its approach to China. It's taking a page from Baidu's playbook and putting a Chinese face on its business there.

Google also is seeking partnerships with popular Chinese Internet companies. Its biggest win is a deal to serve as the search engine for Tencent, China's dominant instant messaging service. It is targeting narrow but influential markets, too. One such effort, a program to copy Chinese books onto the Internet, is designed to appeal to China's intellectual elite.

A look inside the fight between Google and Baidu, through visits to the rivals, showed just how sharp-elbowed and complex the bout gets. Google is taking the optimistic view of a company accustomed to trouncing, or buying, its rivals. "We are still looking at a battle for every Internet user in China," Cassidy said.

Baidu became a point of pride for the Chinese after its stock price jumped fivefold to $154 on the day of its 2005 first offering. The stock quickly fell, but its early rise prompted a hysteria that made Baidu founder Robin Li a national hero. Baidu shares now trade around $110.

Baidu is in a dominant position. It has designed features that appeal to Chinese users, beat its competitors to market and cast Google as a foreigner with suspicious ambitions.  Baidu's use of nationalism was on display in a recent online advertising campaign. Baidu has decoded China's cultural cryptography in ways that have eluded Google. A key example: Baidu's embrace of paid search results. For many popular search terms, Baidu ranks results by how much an advertiser is willing to pay for prominent placement.

Google and other U.S.-based players don't embrace pay-for-placement. In the U.S., it would undermine a search engine's credibility. In China, surveys have shown that users trust paid results. Many think that an advertiser's willingness to pay for placement reflects a confidence that they have the right answer to the user's query.

Additionally, Baidu serves up Post Bar, an online gathering place of sorts. Post Bar enables users to answer search queries, comment on one another's answers and form the sort of social networking community that U.S. search engines have ceded to sites such as MySpace.

Meanwhile, Google is trying to attract Chinese Internet users but has had some stumbles. Its effort to finesse Chinese censorship is among them.

Google.com in China has been plagued by sluggish performance and frequent breakdowns. Google says Chinese service providers deliberately slow its service. And search terms deemed politically sensitive — "Tiananmen Square," for example — delay it even more. Repeated efforts will sever the Internet connection. Because Google has no servers in China, it is thought that sensitive queries are caught by censors as they travel from China to Google's servers outside.

Google tried to fix the problem this year by introducing Google.cn, a search service with the Chinese government's seal of approval. Google cut a deal with censors, agreeing to block results for a secret list of terms. Google won a right to notify users when results are blocked, but the effect is the same: Results don't get delivered.

Google's capitulation ignited a political firestorm in the U.S., and Congress held a hearing on the subject. The move remains a political blemish no matter how much Google has argued that a diluted Google in China is better than none.

Source:佚名