Google China News

Despite its problems with censorship, the Chinese Web is opening itself to the world pretty fast, and since Baidu has the largest share of the Internet search market, there's plenty for Google to do in order to catch up. The interesting part is that a very strong part of Baidu is its music search capability, and that's exactly where Google tries to hit it now, since Google Music China is taking off as we speak...

Located at google.cn/music, the site is only accessible to Chinese Internet users, allowing them to search by song title and artist. Since Google is not selling any music, as far as I know, the search results are pointing to audio tracks hosted by Top100.cn, a Chinese music site financially backed up by Yao Ming.

So...why should Google do such a thing, if they aren't going to be the ones actually selling music? The answer is simple:ads. What about them? Obviously, their music site for China will be ad-supported, and the revenue will be shared with Top100 and its partners, as Google says.

As I see things now, the problem for Google will be that Baidu provides deep links to huge amounts of illegal music, but since now it's under heavy fire in a legal battle started because of copyright infringement, this may not keep standing for much long. After all, it may be possible for some of those links to be unavailable already, but since I have no knowledge of Chinese, I can't go surf around in Baidu and figure that out for myself...

Anyway, I am sure there's still a lot for Chinese users to find Baidu attractive, and the good part is that Google China doesn't believe in "killing" its competitor. "The Internet industry should by no means stand in the opposite camp against the music industry. Google always believes profoundly that mutual interest, rather than monopoly, is the key to sustainable growth," said Google China President Kai-fu Lee said in a statement to Reuters.

At last, if you have any information regarding this subject, please go ahead and give us a hand. Google China is a very interesting subject, and I am sure it must be more than meets the eye to it, but if I don't get any "inside info"(inside China, or at least someone familiar with the language), it's all just a scratch of the surface...