Baidu already have more than 75% of the Chinese search engine market all to themselves and are beginning to eat away at Google rather slim share, but that isn’t enough for General Manager of Baidu, Yueguo Feng as he has plans to whip Google’s Android OS from the American web giant.
Gizchina News of the week
Baidu today claimed that they are in talks with a number of Android smartphones makers in China and who sell phones to the worlds fastest growing cell phone market, to have the default Google search replaced on handsets with Baidu’s own. The talks seem to be going well for Baidu too as they claim 80% of all Android phones that will be sold in China will be getting Baidu search as default rather than Google’s.
The news is obviously going to leave a soar taste in the mouths of those at Google, but what can they do to retaliate short of withdrawing Android from open source? Surely they wouldn’t do that would they?
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Recently when searching for Chinese terms using Google I’ve found that I get the Connection Reset Error more than once, effectively locking me out of Google for five minutes at a time or more, so I have to use Baidu.
Ive come to believe that banning or slowing down Google (and Gmail) to the point where they are unusable goes against WTO rules, the government is using the Great Firewall as a modern day trade barrier to protect its own internal suppliers/manufacturers of content which are not as strong as Google.
Google will continue to innovate in China to gain market share with savvy users (see Android/MP3 streaming/Books etc)but ultimately Baidu will rule the roost for basic bread and butter search abilities.
I’ve been having similar problems while trying to use certain Google services.
LMAO google literally cannot withdraw android from open source the best they can do is to stop future development.