Google gets the Baidu blues again after mapping losses

Chinese rival set to overtake Google Maps

Google looks like being beaten again in China, as Baidu leaps ahead in the mobile mapping space.

The text ads giant was still second in the Quarterly Survey of China's Mobile Map Client Market, but only just, according to Beijing-based Analysys International.

Chinese player Autonavi was the market leader by a long way, with 25.7 per cent, and Google Maps came in second with 17.5 per cent, but had Baidu breathing down its neck in third with a 17.3 per cent share.

The momentum is with the Chinese search firm too – Baidu Maps' market share rose from 13.6 per cent in Q1 to 17.3 per cent in Q2 while Google’s fell from 23.2 per cent. As a result, Baidu is predicted to supplant Google in the current quarter.

To add to Google’s woes, the analyst said local users were having problems updating their version of its mapping client, while Apple is set to drop Google Maps as a pre-install on the next version of iOS, with reports suggesting Cupertino is working with Autonavi now in the region.

“If the above problems are not solved quickly, it's hard for Google map to reverse the situation,” wrote Analysys International in a blog post.

Baidu and Google are of course old foes in the search space, where the home-grown firm routed its Californian rival after Google moved its search servers to Hong Kong in 2010 over censorship concerns.

Google's market share is now around 16 per cent while Baidu dominates with around 78 per cent.

The mobile map market in China is growing at a staggering pace, jumping 206 per cent year-on-year last quarter to 229 million accounts, according to Analysys International.

The analyst predicted it would be a key battle ground for the next phase of the mobile internet given that maps and associated apps are closely tied to up to a quarter of mobile advertising. ®

By Phil Muncaster 
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Google plans major revamp for search engine

The Web giant has been working on the "next generation of search" over the last couple of years and now it's ready to start rolling it out.

Google is about to embark on its biggest renovation in history. In order to keep up with increased competition and new technology, the Web giant is working to keep ahead of the pack by completely revamping its search function, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Google search executive Amit Singhal told The Wall Street Journal that the new Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world."

Changes are expected to roll out over the next few months, the Journal reports, but the full makeover to "next generation of search" will likely take years. A Google spokesperson told CNET that there is not a specific timeline and the company's philosophy is to launch things when they're ready.

The plan for the revamp isn't necessarily to swap out the current keyword-search system but rather to provide more relevant results. This process will work by using technology called "semantic search." With semantic searches, people's searches will be better matched with "entities"--or people, places and things--which the company has been building over the past two years, reports the Journal.

For example, the Journal reports that people who search for "Lake Tahoe" today get links to the lake's visitor bureau website and a map; whereas with the makeover, they will see key "attributes" about the lake, including location, altitude, average temperature and salt content.

Google is basically building an infrastructure layer or a knowledge graph that would underlie many aspects of Google, a spokesperson told CNET. The idea is to make more possibilities with search using these entities.

According to the Journal, this renovation most likely comes with changes to how the search engine actually works, including search engine optimization, advertising, and page-ranking results. Some 10 percent to 20 percent of all search queries could be directly impacted by the change, the Journal reports.

Over the past few months, Google has been making various changes to search, such as showing search results before a person finishes typing their query, adding Google+ to searches, adding concert dates to music queries, and saving searches across platforms with the new "recent" icon.

By Dara Kerr

Dara Kerr, a freelance journalist based in the Bay Area, is fascinated by robots, supercomputers and Internet memes. When not writing about technology and modernity, she likes to travel to far-off countries. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

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