Visit Twellow.com

Google Beats Baidu In Blind Test

Google fans take note: this victory wasn’t of the runaway variety.  But a win’s a win, and a new study did indeed find that Chinese users might prefer Google over Baidu.

I say “might” because, during testing, the study’s participants didn’t know which search engine was which.  So even after their votes put Google into first place, participants may have gone home and started using Baidu again.

That would be their loss (and Google’s); “Google achieved an overall satisfactory rating from 48.2% of the 2,740 Web surfers who participated in a grueling 12-day blind test, beating Nasdaq-listed Baidu’s 39.8%,” reports Shu-Ching Jean Chen for Forbes.

And while both those numbers look kind of low, they mean that Google scored almost 23% higher than its Chinese competitor.  In fact, “Google trumped Baidu in all but entertainment,” so the American search engine giant really did rather well.

Nonetheless, Google has a lot of obstacles to overcome before it can succeed in China, and objective performance-related issues constitute a comparatively minor problem.  Instead, Google needs to worry about public opinion and government censorship.

According to CRN’s Simon Burns, “China-based consultancy Pacific Epoch said in a summary of local news reports that leading Chinese news source Sina.com had ‘censored’ its ‘pro-Google’ story about the search survey after ‘controversial comments’ from its users.”  Yikes.

Anyway, the study’s findings are still a good thing for Google.  Maybe they’re a sign that the search engine can succeed, after all.

Digg This! StumbleUpon This!
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget

News Tags: Google, Baidu, China
About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Comments

It's the under 24s

Google is losing among the young, and that's what should be most worrying them.

http://chinasearchads.wordpress.com

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
12 + 3 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.