The search is on

March was a difficult month for Google in China. It got into another spat with the government, accusing it of disrupting its Gmail service, a charge dismissed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Perhaps more importantly, Google also lost another local partner, Sina Corp, the third most visited website in China.

The break-up didn't come as a huge surprise. Last year, Google said it would eventually phase out its censored search contracts with its Chinese partners. Sina CEO Charles Chao also said the company had not generated any revenue from its partnership with Google.

Ever since Google withdrew from the Chinese mainland and moved to Hong Kong in March 2010, its search has been unstable and slow in China. The question now is whether Sina can take over where Google has left off.

Bigger engine

When Sina announced they would be teaming up with Google to strengthen their search engine under a revenue-sharing arrangement in June 2007, their goal was to make search their third strongest revenue stream. Three years and 10 months later, Sina announced the contract had expired.

Sina's search engine was never one of the company's main strengths, but finding a new partner to help improve it won't be an easy task. Several of China's main search engine providers are also Sina's principal competitors, such as Sohu.com and Tencent Holdings.

However, Sina's microblog service, Sina Weibo, could offer a huge advantage. It has already added significantly to the company's market value but could also aid its push for search engine dominance.

Google's withdrawal from the Chinese mainland brought a change in the relationship between Baidu and Sina, according to Cao Junbo, chief analyst at Beijing-based Internet research center iResearch. "Sina's search section hasn't been doing very well, but with Weibo, Sina has a huge comparative advantage against any other secondary search engines like Tencent or Sohu," Cao said.

Baidu also cannot search content generated by Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblogging site with more than 100 million users, more than one fifth of China's 457 million Web users. "So anyone who wants to look up Sina Weibo has to use Sina's own search engine," Cao added.

While searching about Bob Dylan, for instance, Baidu would show news, music, pictures, ticket websites and Baidu's Internet forum. Sina's search engine also showed news, music and videos, but also Sina Weibo results, some of which were celebrities commenting on how much they were looking forward to Dylan's Beijing concert last week, or users commenting on how much they paid for a ticket.