After closing down its search engine service in China last year, Google has now launched a new service to collect group-buying deals in the nation.
On Tuesday, the search engine giant launched Google Shihui, as a public beta through its Google.cn domain. Shihui can be translated to mean ‘timely benefit’ in English. The site is expected to provide information on group discounts supplied by more than 100 partners.
Google spokesman Robin Moroney said that Shihui is an experimental search feature that aims to help people find deals through China’s enormous number of group buying sites. According to analysts, China’s group-buying market has exploded in the past year to include more than 4,000 sites.
The Shihui page can be sorted by types of products including food, hotels, entertainment and beauty products, as well as by group-buying sites. Providers listed at the top of the page include Groupon Inc.’s China venture Gaopeng.com and local rivals such as Lashou.com, Manzuo and Tuanbaowang.
Moroney said, “Shihui is in the early stages of development and we’ll be working with our partners to see what features drive the best traffic to their sites and also what features guide users to the offers that are most valuable to them.”
The Shihui site allows Google to tap into the expanding group deals market in China, without having to establish its own group buying company in the country.
Earlier this year, popular U.S. Group deal company Groupon launched its own site in China, but struggled to compete and has resorted to staff-retrenchment to remain viable.
Google has been losing market share in China’s search market to Baidu, since January 2010, when the company said it would no longer comply with China’s self-censorship regulations for websites. A couple of months later, Google redirected its Chinese users to an unfiltered site in Hongkong.
According to Analysys International, a Beijing-based research firm, Google’s share of search market fell to 19% in the second quarter of 2011 as compared to a peak of 36 % in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Google’s other services such as YouTube, Google Plus and Gmail have all been subjected to some level of blocking from the Chinese officials due to the scare that such sites could be used to spread anti-government content.
There is a general belief that Shihui, being a e-commerce business site, might be fairly safe from government prying. Mark Natkin, managing director, Marbridge Consulting, Beijing said that Shihui probably will not draw the attention of China’s Internet censors because it is a fairly safe neutral area of business. He said that Google was still interested in growing business in the China market and has realized that in areas like Web search it may face more challenges than in less sensitive areas like e-commerce.
Recent setbacks notwithstanding, Google said it still aims to introduce new web services in China. In a speech last December, Google senior vice president Alan Eustace called China, “the heart of the future of the Internet.”
The one positive sign for Google is that its Internet license, which must be reviewed annually, was approved by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology earlier this month.