Google tweaks Chinese search engine with more features

Google may be steadily losing market share in China to rival Baidu.com, but the company is not giving up, adding several new features to its Google.cn search engine, including some capabilities that are not available on Google.com.

The Google.cn search engine was launched by Google in early 2006. The search engine, which culls search results that might offend the Chinese government’s censors, was created to help Google grow faster in China, where the company’s main search engine, Google.com, is sometimes slow or unavailable.

There was just one problem with this strategy: most of Google’s Chinese users still prefer to use Google.com, which also offers the ability to search the Web in Chinese, instead of Google.cn.

That hasn’t discouraged Google, which in recent months has steadily added new features to Google.cn, such as the ability to search Chinese Web sites using Pinyin, a romanization system for characters that allows Chinese words to be spelled out using the Roman alphabet. That capability, already available from Baidu, allows users to search using Chinese without having to switch from English to Chinese input systems.

Searching on Google.cn for ‘zhong guo,’ which means ‘China,’ still returns a list of results containing these words. But like Baidu, the Web site also asks if you want to search for ‘China’ using Chinese characters. Clicking on that link brings a user to another page of results for the Chinese characters ‘zhong guo,’ which also includes links to a couple of news stories.

In addition to allowing users to search for Pinyin, Google.cn now has an auto-complete compatibility, introduced in January, similar to the company’s Google Suggest service. This feature suggests possible search terms on Google.cn when letters or characters are entered — a feature that you won’t find on Baidu or the main Google.com search engine.

Typing ‘zho’ into the search field on Google.cn now yields a list of search terms in Chinese characters, including ‘China Mobile,’ ‘Bank of China,’ and ‘China maps,’ among others, along with the number of results available for each term. Ironically, the top search result on Google.cn for ‘China maps’ is Sougou Map Search, a service offered by rival Sohu.com Inc., that competes with Google.cn’s own localized map service, which was launched earlier this month.

Whether the addition of these features will help reverse Google’s fortunes in China remains to be seen. The search engine’s popularity has fallen steadily over the last year, even among the older and more affluent Internet users that the company once considered its strongest base.

(Steven Schwankert, in Beijing, contributed to this story.)