Yahoo China is considering the acquisition of other domestic search engines to revamp its business and catch up with market leaders Baidu and Google.

 

The focus for Yahoo China, operated by domestic e-commerce king Alibaba.com Corp, will be online community and local information search sites and helping users locate products and services, Tao Ran, a company spokesman, said yesterday.

 

"We are considering merging vertical search engines into our service package as we are already set on better combining Yahoo China's service with our e-commerce resources," Tao said.

 

Yahoo was surpassed by Google in the Chinese search market after Alibaba took over its operations in 2005.

 

Last year, Yahoo ranked third with a 13 percent share of commercial users. Google held 20 percent of the 1.6-billion-yuan (US$205 million) market, which expanded 50 percent from a year ago. Baidu.com led with nearly half of the market, according to the Internet Society of China.

 

Zeng Ming, who has headed Yahoo China since November, said in an internal e-mail to his staff yesterday that Yahoo China's approach this year will be "to provide different search services and be credited for that."

 

"We will integrate all the resources of our Website to support search services," Zeng said.

 

The goal will be to increase the company's traffic and market share "substantially" this year in the China market, home to around 140 million Internet users.

 

(Shanghai Daily March 14, 2007)