China search engine market reached 7.78 billion yuan (USD 1.25 billion) in Q3 2012, with the QoQ growth of 13.5% and YoY growth of 44.1%. China’s search engine market growth is slowing down as the growth rate is lower than 50% for the very first time due to a few factors:
- Affected by the macroeconomic situation, advertisers reduced their advertising budget
- Fast-growing mobile search engine took some market share
- The launch of Qihoo 360 search engine took some search volume market share while having not yet started to contribute revenue to search market
Market Share Distribution Change
In Q3 2012, Baidu’s market share increased from 79.5% to 80.3% while Google suffered a decrease to only 14.6%.
For Google, who previously powered Qihoo 360 navigation and web browser search, also suffered from 360 search engine.
[...] There might be local search engines in some countries that are more important that Google and you will need to optimize and rank for them to be where your audience is (for example, in Russia is Yandex and in China is Baidu). [...]