Bilibili is China’s closest thing to YouTube (the world’s second most popular place to search after Google).
Browsers themselves are also often viewed as search engines. Some, like Quark, are created specifically with search in mind. Others, like Safari and UC, are not search engines but still contain search services.
China’s super-app WeChat features a massive “walled garden” of long-form articles and Sogou provides a great search function. We expect its 4% of the vote is understated.
Finally, for e-commerce-related searches, users often go directly whatsapp australia number to the e-commerce platform. Who goes to Baidu to order socks, right? It’s much easier to search on Jingdong or Pinduoduo where one can quickly compare options, purchase, and have the socks delivered by the afternoon. Only two people in the poll mentioned these.
Q&A platform Zhihu also got one vote.
Notable for this informal poll, NOBODY mentioned searching on the Chinese search engines which are third, fourth, and fifth in the Chinese search engine market —Haosou, Sogou, and Shenma.
In the chart below, you can see the data from Statcounter showing dominance by Baidu and a rapidly growing Bing.
While we agree that Haosou, Sogou, and Shenma search engines are much smaller than Baidu, there are two problems:
The massive growth of Bing does not match our experience
It’s limiting to only consider search engines when thinking about where users search.
Search Engine Market Share China from Aug 2023 to Aug 2024
Let’s first see some data about Chinese Internet users.
The 53rd statistical report on China’s Internet Development report contained some interesting data: As of December 2023, the number of Internet users in China reached 1.092 billion, among which mobile Internet users accounted for 1.091 billion, representing 99.9% of the total.
The proportions of internet users using different devices:
Desktop computers – 33.9%
Laptops – 30.3%
TV – 22.5%
Tablet – 26.6%
To sum up, these are the key trends you need to understand:
Around 20% of people in China are not online.
Everybody online uses a mobile device.
People use more than one device type.
They search on the search engine Baidu, and other social platforms, video, e-commerce, and AI tools.
Let’s dig more into the top three channels.
Table of Contents
Baidu: A platform for obtaining news and information