14 DAY TRIAL // After Russia, China is the second country which receives a revamped version of Google Answer, a service that was shut down some time ago. Tianya Club, one of the top online communities in China, signed a deal with the Mountain View company to create Tianya Wenda, the service that seems to replace the old and already dead product, Google Answers. Moreover, Haochi from Googlified informs that Google bought 60 percent of Tianya, representing a new move made by the search giant that might support the Google evolution into the Chinese market.
The Chinese Wenda means "ask and answer" according to Haochi so the purpose of the service is quite obvious. What's most interesting is that the service can be accessed using a Tianya subdomain but - according to some DNS tools - it is hosted on the Google China servers.
According to China Search Engine View, Google's move is very important in the Mountain View company's struggles to beat Baidu, the Chinese leader, which managed to face all the expansion attempts launched by Google. According to the publication, Baidu also owns a questions-and-answers service that will surely compete with this new one owned by Google. "Almost every search provider in China has its answer service. The leading one is Baidu Zhidao. Alexa.com shows Zhidao is the 6th service in Baidu, offers 5% traffic for Baidu.com, and now there are 20 million answered questions on Baidu Zhidao."
Until now, most of the search giant's moves were rejected just from the beginning and China remained a sort of prohibited land for the Mountain View company. Every time, the local leader Baidu attracted the same category of users targeted by Google and managed to face the competition. The company also had problems with the local community because several reports stated that approximately 300 fake agents pretended to be hired by Google and tried to sell the firm's products.