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For a while, it seemed like Google China was doing better - the company had partnered with Sina, bought a stake in Tianya, and received the Chinese government’s permission to provide content.  Now things don’t look so great - Baidu’s market share is up, and Google’s has gone down.

“Baidu has a 69.5 percent share of the search market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, up 7.6 percentage points since last year,” reported the IDG News Service’s Sumner Lemon.   “Meanwhile, Google saw its share of the market shrink, falling 1.1 percentage points to 23 percent.”

The report from which Lemon was working was created by China IntelliConsulting Corp.; also, the report measured things from year to year, so those numbers aren’t just a temporary dip or minor setback.

Then again, some more recent data offered Google a tiny amount of hope.  “[O]ver the last six months, Google has made slight inroads in the battle for online popularity, enjoying a rise in market share of 1.4 per cent, while Baidu only gained 0.5 per cent over the same period,” noted bigmouthmedia.

So it’s not yet time to order a tombstone for Google China, but that’s about the only positive thing that can be said.