Chinese company Baidu.com dominated the country's search engine market in the last financial quarter of 2007, according to the results of a new study.Figures produced by consultancy and research firm Analysys International reveal that Baidu enjoyed a 60.2 per cent share of internet searches conducted within China over the period, Reuters reports.
Google was found to be the second most popular search engine, achieving a 25.9 per cent share of the market, followed by rival Yahoo! China, which took 9.6 per cent.
Between them, the three companies controlled 96 per cent of the searches conducted by Chinese internet users during the quarter.
While Baidu's results for the three-month period were roughly unchanged from the previous quarter, Google gained 2.2 per cent.
With nearly 210 million internet users in China at the end of last year - a figure only surpassed in the US - the country's search engine market reached 946.6 million yuan ($131.3 million) between October and December.
In addition to its domestic success, Baidu is looking to further its endeavours internationally. Earlier this week the search engine announced the full launch of a Japanese version of its service, Baidu.jp.
Commenting on the new offering, vice president of the firm Masuda Jun stated: "We expect to see [a positive reaction] to the four different Japanese language services we will offer, including web search, image search, video search and blog search services."
