Google Failure in China

With 384 million Internet users, China accounts for over one-fifth of the 1.73 billion people around the world that take to the web. A few can blame Google for having nothing less than global domination in its mind, when it entered the Chinese market.

One of the big reasons of Google failure in China was its biggest USP i.e. Search Engine. How ? It is very simple to understand that Chinese language has thousands of characters in it and there would be hundreds of words to express any statement. Because of this, Chinese people don’t like to type anything and then search instead they prefer the navigational searches and links hence the reason why most Chinese portals consist of hundreds of colorful links competing for attention.. And Google was unable to provide such interface to Chinese people. If you see the google’s page for China i.e. http://www.google.com.cn, you’ll find an almost identical search box to the one you’d find on Google’s U.S. page, which poses a big problem considering that it doesn’t fit Chinese characters very well.

Even if Google actually did take the time to study up on the market it wanted so badly, the American corporation wouldn’t be able to understand its audience in the same way Chinese firms like Baidu do. In the battle for global domination of the Internet, Google will just have to settle for everything else… because it can’t win this war. This shows the communication strategy of Google failed in China. Now Google has moved it searches from China to Hong Kong. And this is only because it was failed compliance with the Chinese target market as well as the obligations of government which it couldn’t follow particularly in restricting the searches.

Secondly if you see the ads of the google in china like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEx22Nip4cU you would get it that it only highlights the features that google is providing to the people but how these features are useful it was failed to communicate this. Google should portray the culture of China as it is the main essence in Chinese campaigns and should portray the usage for Chinese people.