Yahoo China to Reorganized as Business-Oriented Search?

Written by Tangos on January 10, 2007
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Yahoo China is going to transforming into a business-oriented search engine to deal with the intense competition from domestic rivals, Jack Ma, CEO of Yahoo China said recently.

Ma said company research showed its search engine attracted more affluent, business-oriented customers, while Baidu’s users were largely students. He said Yahoo China will seek to capitalize on its appeal with high-income users and entrepreneurs. Ma gave no details, but the changes would apparently weight search results more heavily in favor of corporate or business oriented Web sites.

Ma also didn’t say when the changes would take place at Yahoo, but said they would require major shifts in both technology and institutional culture.

“We don’t want those not interested in business or making money. They can go to Baidu,” he said. “Our main focus is the high-end.”

It may be smart for Jack Ma to integrate Yahoo China together with Alibaba, to take advantage of Alibaba’s broad customer base, and differentiated it from Baidu.com. However, I checked the top search keywords of Yahoo China, most of them are entertainment words, not so different from those of Baidu. And in China, it seems many so called high-end users prefer Google’s service, Yahoo China have to compete with Google, if Yahoo also want to focus on high-end users.

It is the the third transition of Yahoo China’s strategy since Jack Ma started to run Yahoo China in October 2005. All those previous transitions failed, this time, will it fail again? I’m not so optimistic on it personally.

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