Shanghai Daily reports:

GOOGLE Inc, trailing Baidu.com Inc in China’s online search market, expects to process more local Web queries through mobile phones than computers by 2011, aided by an alliance with the nation’s largest wireless carrier.

“In some quarters, our mobile traffic will double, whereas it will take perhaps a year to double on the PC side,” Google’s China President Lee Kai-fu said in a Bloomberg Television interview broadcast yesterday.

Baidu is doing something similar, but it looks like they’re in bed with China Telecom.

Where there’s google search, there’s bound to be google ads. CNET’s Crave blog:

Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.

As with the company’s text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.

…During last week’s conference call to discuss quarterly financial results, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was bullish about the opportunity to bring advertising to the mobile Web.

“The mobile ads work very well,” Brin said. “There’s nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search.”

Google’s mobile image ads are similar to those appearing on ordinary Web sites, Google said, but are smaller and are limited to one per page. Advertisers will pay only when users click on an ad, as with the company’s text ads that appear next to search ads. Google requires only one ad per page, and the ads must link to mobile-specific Web pages.

Google and China Mobile went down this road before with a search function for China Mobile’s WAP site Monternet. This effort is different as it targets general internet search via smartphones.

China Mobile is the best thing to happen to Google in China since steamed buns. The partnership represents the best opportunity for Google to get a leg up on Baidu. As Caijing reports, Google believes it needs to better establish its brand in China:

By the end of last year, Google accounted for 25.9 percent of China’s search engine market, while its major rival, the domestic Baidu.com, occupied 60.1 percent in the market.

Kai-Fu Lee [CMiC: Google China’s boss] believed that to Google must take efforts to improve its market reorganization as it wants to raise market share in China. “It’s not because our products are not good. It is just because not enough people know of them.” said Lee.

Everybody knows China Mobile. It’ll be interesting to see how the google search interface will be featured by China Mobile. Just when you think bundling is dead, it always pops up again.

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