Released by EnfoDesk, the statistic of the “Quarterly Marketing Supervision on China’s Internet Search Engine in Q4 2013” showed that the market of China’s search engine enterprises amounted to USD 11.42 billion. The market size increased by 1.2%, compared with Q3 2013, and had a 40.3% YoY increase. In 2013, the total market of China’s search engine enterprises reached USD 39.36 billion, increasing by 36.7%, comparing with 2012.
In the market share by revenue (excluding channel revenue), Baidu accounted for 78.4% share, while Google China and Sogou (including Soso) accounted for 13.7% and 5.3% respectively.
In the market share by revenue (including channel revenue), Baidu accounted for 76.6%, followed by Google China and Sogou (including Soso) accounted for 11.8% and 8.0% respectively.
Baidu remained its leading position in China search engine market. Both its efforts on PC and mobile devices contributed to its achievements. However, Google China’s market share dropped slightly. As the competition among search engines became more fierce, what’s more, Google had been losing its product managers and IT elites in China, Google’s market share was encroached bit by bit. The merging of Soso and Sogou increased the new Sogou’s market share, benefiting from the technology and traffic sources of Tencent platforms. With an improvement on its product and marketing system, Qihu 360 began to stand out among the rest.
Generally, the search engine market kept stable with a slowdown on its growth rate. Baidu, Google and Sogou were the three major players in the current market. In the near future, Qihu 360 would take a place in the market by improving its commercial system. Compared with the stable search engine market in PC, the accelerating commercialization in mobile market will be the main trend of future search engine market. As a mature and technique-required advertising model that can bring a high ROI , search engine will continue to gain its popularity.