Why google is quitting China??

Why Google Is Quitting China
Rebecca Fannin,  
It's not censorship. The search giant just couldn't compete with Baidu.




It's easy to give up if you've already lost the battle. And Google is doing just that in China. Eric Schmidt's move to quit offering a censored Google.cn search engine to the Chinese market has been read by idealists as the right thing to do. But it is first a business decision.

Even though Google's ( GOOG - news - people ) market share climbed from 15% in mid-2006 to 31% today, the company had hoped for a bigger share by now. Kai-Fu Lee, Google China's former president, told me in 2006 that Google not only wanted to have a competitive product to Baidu's, the local search leader, but a superior product. This didn't happen: Baidu has only increased its market share, going from 47% in mid-2006 to 64% today. That's a big lead.
 

Baidu, started by China-born entrepreneur Robin Li in late 1999 just as Larry Page and Sergey Brin were cranking up Google in Silicon Valley, understands the local Chinese market better than Google's Mountain View team.

Google fumbled with an initially inferior Chinese search engine launched in 2000, while Baidu grabbed the lead in China--and kept it--with several innovative search features customized for local tastes. Baidu introduced community-oriented services that appealed to Chinese Internet users, including bulletin boards where leads on information could be exchanged--a service that Google China's former president Kai-Fu Lee dismissed as having nothing to do with search. Baidu also offered instant messaging, a hit with China's Netizens.

Plus, Baidu was first to the market with mobile search and information offered up in multimedia, including video clips. Baidu also set up a national network of advertising resellers in 200 Chinese cities to educate businesses about the power of online advertising--a step that Google did not take.

Baidu's search feature for music also proved highly popular. Google, realizing the potentially illegal nature of the free music downloads, opted to provide links to music stores instead. Baidu later began collaborating with music labels on authorized downloads.