Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that the company was likely to abandon its China-based search engine Google.cn due to lack of marketshare and censorship issues. Other sources have expressed the announcement as inevitable, citing the recent Chinese government threats to shut the service down less than 6 months after it’s debut.
Earlier this year - Jan. 25th, Google established Google.cn a Chinese government censored version of the search engine which operates on servers based in China in co-operation with Google.
Recent reports have also revealed that Google.cn make up less than 1% of the people who use Google.com, a fraction of the original anticipated audience projections. According to third-party estimates, Baidu has gone from 2.5% of the search market in 2003 to 46% in 2005, while Google’s market share in China has rapidly declined.
In our opinion it’s looking like the government censorship has scared off a lot the potential users, and the people aren’t adopting the tool like they do in other countries. One prominent internet source Reporters Without Borders stated that “The launch of Google.cn is a black day for freedom of expression in China”.
One Response to “Google.cn Being Abandoned or Forced to Shut Down?”
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June 12th, 2006 at 1:08 am
SimpleSEM - Google.cn Being Abandoned or Forced to Shut Down?…
News is Google.cn is about to bite the big one…as many predicted users aren’t adopting the new search platform, and Government censorship has negatively affected growth. Maybe Google will do the right thing, and ‘do no evil,” afterall!…