Google Inc announced that it has given itself a new name for
entry into the Chinese marketplace as it formally opened its new
engineering center in Beijing yesterday.
In an effort to make is easier for Chinese people to use its
services and attract new users the US-based firm said it would be
known as Gu Ge which means "song of the harvest of
grain."
It is the first time Google, which lags behind in China's web
search market, has given itself a new identity in another
language.
"Our No.1 goal here by far is to serve Chinese users who want
useful information from the Internet," said Eric Schmidt, Google's
chief executive officer.
China overtook the US as the world's largest Internet market in
terms of users last week and will "continue to lead the world for
many, many, many years," Schmidt pointed out.
Schmidt is visiting China with a group of Google's senior
executives to scrutinize the market after the US giant initially
announced its Beijing plans last September.?
To get the new operation off the ground Google has recruited
about 80 engineering graduates in China, 15 have come from Google's
headquarters in Silicon Valley, California and five top computer
research scientists from around the world have joined the team,
according to Kai-fu Lee, corporate vice-president and president of
Google China.
"Most of our investment is in people," said Schmidt. He added
that the number of employees would soon grow to "a few thousand" in
the coming years.
Google already has another engineering institute in Taipei but
it aims to increase research facilities in Beijing, Shanghai and
possibly other Chinese cities.
The CEO of the world's most frequently used search engine said
the next goal was to have a data center in China in order to speed
up services for local customers. Google would then work with local
libraries to bring large amounts of information from Chinese books
to the Internet.
"Our business in China is not about revenue but about serving
end users," said Schmidt in an interview.
Google's major local competitor Baidu, which is listed on the
NASDAQ with Google as a small investor, also got its name from a
traditional Chinese poem.
The idea behind the use of a Chinese name is to help the company
reach more users many of whom don't speak English and have
difficulties pronouncing the name. This hinders their use of the
search engine.
According to the professional Internet research firm, Shanghai
iResearch, revenue from the Web search market in 2005 was 1.04
billion yuan (US$129 million), 82 percent up on 2004.
Web search engine Yahoo! led the market with a combination of
search services on three websites operating in China. Baidu ranked
second with 26 percent of the pie and Google was the third with 14
percent.
Schmidt acknowledged it was "our mistake" not to come to China
earlier which had given Baidu a head start in the market.
All major research organizations interested in the Chinese
market rank Baidu as the largest single search engine in China.
A March survey by China Popular Computer Weekly
involving 120,000 Internet users showed that more than 60 percent
use Baidu while 28 percent chose Google.
Schmidt said some other Internet giants from the US such as
Yahoo!, AOL, Amazon and eBay, had difficulties exporting their
systems to China because of tough local competition and slow
progress to meet local demands. .
"We're often not the first in the market but we often grow more
quickly," he said.
(China Daily April 13, 2006)