Mideast readies for the battle of search engines

The Baidu headquarters in Beijing. For the Middle East, Baidu already came up with an Android web browser in Arabic language as early as in 2011, but now wants to expand with a full-fledged version of its search portal in Arabic.

By Arno Maierbrugger/Gulf Times Correspondent/Bangkok

Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine, is facing new competition as the largest national search engines of China, Baidu, and Russia, Yandex, are intensifying steps to tap into the Arabic-speaking market. Bejing-based Baidu, China’s dominant search engine with a domestic market share of 80% and used by hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet surfers, has recently embarked on an international expansion drive that includes the Middle East, Southeast Asia and even Latin America.

As for the Middle East, Baidu already came up with an Android web browser in Arabic language as early as in 2011, but now wants to expand with a full-fledged version of its search portal in Arabic.

The strategy of the Chinese search engine to take on Google is “to go where English is not the dominant language, build capabilities in that market - and then expand,” according to Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s director for international communications.

“Today we are the No 2 search engine in the world. The core technology for searches in a way can be applied elsewhere, so there’s some scale to leverage from existing platforms,” he says.

The other search platform with plans to challenge Google in the Mena (Middle and North Africa) region is Russia’s Internet search giant Yandex. The Nasdaq-listed company has a market share of 62% in Russia and started its international expansion with services for Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the Arabian region is now high on the cards.

These steps all makes sense as China, Russia and the Middle East are three of the fastest growing global internet markets, and studies have shown that web users in the Middle East spend more time online than in any other markets.

Over the past decade, Arabic Internet penetration grew a whopping 2,500% to some 73mn users with many countries still not having reached a degree of Internet adoption seen in the West.

Interestingly, residents of Qatar are more connected to the Internet than almost any other country in the world, the United Nation’s State of Broadband Report 2013 has found. At 88.1%, Qatar ranked first in the developing world in terms of percentage of individuals using the Internet, and second only to South Korea (97%) for percentage of households with Internet, the study said. The report also found that Qatar ranked 10th worldwide in terms of percentage of individuals using the Internet, meaning people are not just connected at home, but also at work, and on their smartphones and laptops.

Qatar was the only Mena country to make it to the top 10. Bahrain, however, follows closely with 88% penetration, and the UAE is 17th with 85%. Saudi Arabia was ranked 67th, with about half of the individuals in its country (54%) using the Internet.

However, analysts argue that Baidu and Yandex will have to come up with convincing alternatives if they want to dethrone Google in the Middle East. The US search giant still occupies a market share in the Middle East of around 85% in average, followed by Yahoo, Bing and “others” far behind, including Lebanon-based Ayna, the first and presently largest Pan-Arabic search engine.