Google Inks Agreement with Chinese Portal Sina

[Brett_Tabke]

Sina and Google form Internet partnership [news.yahoo.com].

Leading Chinese Internet portal Sina Corp. said Monday it has reached an agreement with Google Inc. to cooperate in the areas of searching and advertising.

Under a strategic partnership agreement, Google's search service will be embedded in Sina's search box, Sina said in a news release.

[antonaf]

Google has found its way around the Baidu battle. Hats off to Google, as they are definitely playing chess. That was a very strategic move.

[bill]

Sina has always been well known for its portal. They have a good deal of content and eyeballs.

I haven't kept up to date with the portals of late. How does Sina rank now?

[redstorm]

How does Sina rank now?

Sina is still the number one among the portal websites.
the cooperation between search engines and portals have been used years ago. Nothing new in its form.

[bill]

Google did very well in Japan getting itself similar deals with Japanese portals. That was one of their primary paths to growth. I just see this as Google continuing this successful strategy in China. There are still some portal opportunities out there in the China market.

[redstorm]

Well, till now, nobody can conclude who will win: baidu or google?
In fact, google takes at least 30% market share in the Mainland market. Not as small as somebody else has assumed.

[bill]

There was also the recent report claiming that in a blind test Chinese users preferred Google SERPs to Baidu [iaskchina.cn] (Chinese article). These may be signs that eventually Google will prevail. I'm not sure.

I've had plenty of experiences where I felt Baidu produced far more relevant SERPs for my searches. At times the Google SERPs were almost unusable. We've also had plenty of reports in this forum from users in China who have commended Baidu's relevance and condemned Google's poor grasp of Chinese. Maybe that's changing now.