Chinese search engine market seen as gold mine

From CHINAdaily.com:

"Sohu was only one of the many companies to strengthen its position in the search engine market in 2004 alongside its arch-rivals Sina Corp and Netease.com, and professional search engine provider Zhongsou.com. This proves to be a new gold mine after online advertising, mobile phone messages, and online games.
Their decision was wise enough, as the market maintained its fast-track development in 2004, but most of them might not be able to feel happy about the results, as the statistics from some research firms showed recently."

"Henry Yang, president of Shanghai iResearch Co Ltd, a professional Internet industry consulting firm, told China Business Weekly last Thursday that the scale of the search engine market including advertising, paid listings and real name searches will exceed 1.2 billion yuan (US$145 million), from 500 million yuan (US$60.39 million) in 2003."

"The Beijing-based research house said in its report that Baidu has become the biggest player in the market with 32.9 per cent of the share, while Yisou under Yahoo! ranked the second with 19.6 per cent of the pie."

"Chen divided the top players into two camps: Yisou, Yahoo! China, and 3721 under Yahoo!, versus Baidu and Google in the Google camp. ... Yang believed it would be hard for most of other players to make breakthroughs in challenging the top three's positions." Read more