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Fresh news on Google’s international front: the search engine giant is preparing to open a research and development center in Shanghai, China later this month.

Google Researches China

Aside from the exact date of the center’s opening - June 25 - most of Google’s plans remain unclear.  “The California provider of Web-search services declined to say how much it intends to invest in the center or how many engineers it will employ,” reports Terence Poon for the Wall Street Journal.

Poon was able to name one Googler related to the endeavor - Cui Jin, a media-relations specialist - but, unfortunately, not much relating to the media occurred.  Cui Jin “said the center will carry out research related to Chinese-language Internet searches but declined to elaborate,” according to the WSJ article.

Cui Jin was willing to share a little more information with Reuters, however, and it turns out that the center is “to be co-headed by Wang Jing, who previously worked in R&D at eBay Inc, and by Yang Wenluo, who worked at Intel Corp.”  Those are some impressive connections, made all the more interesting by the recent disagreement between Google and eBay.

As with just about anything, though, one has to wonder if those connections can do any good in the realm of Google China.  The company’s market share is always pretty poor, and the WSJ relayed the latest statistics: Google has 19 percent, and Baidu has 57 percent.  Looks like those R&D guys will need to work hard.