Wednesday 13th January 2010

Boston and Dublin: Wednesday, 13th January 2010: Google has been closing the gap on Chinese search engine leader Baidu over the last six months according to web analytics company StatCounter. The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that at the end of 2009 Baidu held 56% of the Chinese market compared to Google's 43%.

"Google has made impressive gains in China since July last when it was at 30% compared to Baidu's 68%," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Our analysis suggests that given Google's recent strong performance, market share is certainly not the reason behind its threat to leave China at this time."

At the end of 2009 Yahoo! and Bing's combined share of the Chinese search market stood at just 1.18%.

Despite significant gains in China in the last six months, Google's market share there still lags its global penetration where it has over 90% of the market.

The analysis is based on 24 million search engine referring clicks from China which were collected between July and December 2009.

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About StatCounter

StatCounter, a free online visitor stats tool, was founded in 1999. It offers its members the chance to grow and improve their online businesses by allowing them to monitor the number of hits to their website; the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views; keywords used to find the site plus other features. For information on this real-time, user-friendly, and free visitor stats tool, please visit www.statcounter.com.