US search engine giants Yahoo and Google are posed to take a dominant position in the world's most populous country by launching new services and partnering with local companies, according to Tuesday's China Daily.

Yahoo! in Beijing Monday launched a search engine portal, Yisou.com, the first time that the US company has registered a new website for its search engine service in a country outside the United States.

"Many things that we did not do in any other Yahoo! markets were done in China and these moves show our strong commitment to this market," said David Lu, deputy managing director of Yahoo!'s North Asia operations.

The search engine portal has a clean and simple interface similar to professional search engine service providers such as Google and the Chinese firm Baidu.com.

Yahoo! will relocate about 1,000 search engine servers from the United States to China next month and the servers will be used to provide services for the Chinese population around the world.

Lu said that Yahoo! would not focus on short-term returns from Yahoo! China and new services.

Zhou Hongyi, president of Yahoo! China, said he believed that the launch of the new search portal would change the competition scenario in China.

"If we say the competition in China was mainly between Google and Baidu before, the future one will be between the two alliances -- Yahoo!-3721 versus Google-Baidu," he said.

Yahoo! acquired Hong Kong-based 3721 Network Software Co Ltd, which controls the major Chinese real name service provider Beijing 3721, last year for US$120 million.

Google, which has not had a physical presence in China, last week reportedly invested US$10 million in Baidu, a major Chinese search engine. A free-lance Internet analyst surnamed Lu said the moves from Yahoo! and Google would have significant impact on the search engine market because of their huge capital and rich experience in the field.

(China Daily June 22, 2004)