Google Launches Deals Aggregator In China

[engine]

Google Launches Deals Aggregator In China [news.idg.no]

Google has launched a new portal in China that catalogs group buying deals, a return to activity there after pulling back from its operations in China more than a year ago.

The site is called Google Shihui, which can be translated to mean timely benefit in English. Google launched the site on Tuesday as a public beta through its Google.cn domain. Last year, the company shut down its search engine on Google.cn and instead put a link on the page to its Hong Kong search engine at Google.com.hk.

Shihui is an experimental search feature that aims to help people find deals through China's enormous number of group buying sites, said Google spokesman Robin Moroney.

[bw100]

Very interesting.

Don't be too quick to discount this development. China has a huge and growing internet population, and a rapidly growing amount of expendable income . This may be a bellewether of a significant change in geographic / cultural internet strategy for Google.

Could this be Google's new "international" lab.

Had the thought of calling some "in-law cousins" there, but realized I would wake them up, and didn't want to endure their verbal abuse, since my limited Mandarin vocabulary includes most of their favorite descriptive expletive-filled phrases. I'll wait until later this evening.

It will be fun to watch this develop; I will say the food looks good, and it brings back many fond memories from many visits to the alleys of Beijing, and other cities. I am ravenous just thinking about it. (Wonder if take-out is available, and if they deliver). Maybe it's time for another visit to the extended family there.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Affiliate spam, quick, remove it from the index and search results asap!

Seriously, mashup is so overdone and continues to drain the life of the individual sites rendering them less useful, and lower ranked, than the big brand mash.

It's like a cancer.

[bill]

I didn't know you had such a stake in the China market... ;)

Google is jumping into a part of the market that already has established players. If they can perform better they can get a foot back into the market in China. If Google doesn't do it there are already other sites aggregating e-commerce info like this in China already.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I have a stake in the "aggregator" market, all webmasters who's content and reviews are "borrowed" by bigger companies do. If I search for widgets and end up on Google mashup only to be redirected to the widgets site that costs the widgets site money, they need to pay affiliate fees to Google. I should land on that site directly should I not?

Should a search engine really be an affiliate mashup company too? It's a major conflict of interest imo.