14 DAY TRIAL // Google signed a deal with Sina, a Chinese portal, in a move that is obviously intended to increase the search giant's presence on the local market and help it conquer the Chinese users. The two companies will work together for news content, search engines and the advertising platforms. As expected, the Mountain View giant will be allowed to place adverts on the portal while the visitors of the webpage will be able to use the Google search engine. At the beginning, the agreement will be quite limited, as it will allow the visitors to access only the news content provided by the portal.
"In the future, we can explore cooperation in advertising and search, and other areas," Lee Kai-Fu, the president of Google in Greater China, told reporters, according to Reuters. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In the recent period, Google strives to expand its solutions into the Chinese market but every time, it encounters different problems that are making their efforts almost useless. First, it was the local giant Baidu, a company that is often described as the Chinese Google. Baidu offers almost the same services as the well-known Mountain View company and obviously, aims to attract the same category of users. Because Baidu is a Chinese-based firm, it was extremely difficult for Google to conquer the market and manage to beat the famous local leader.
Apart from Baidu, there were a lot of other factors that contributed to the rejection of the Google expansion. For example, approximately 300 fake agents pretended to be hired by the search giant to sell their products in China but they received money without offering any solution. Obviously, they damaged Google's image, some of the users considering that working with the Mountain View company can be somehow risky.