Hitwise Data Shows Baidu Strike Ineffective, But 360 Search Has Hit Plateau

After a couple weeks of battle between Qihoo 360 and Baidu, we’re finally starting to see some data on how the search market is settling down. The results are good and bad for both Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), according to the latest data from Hitwise:

The chart above shows us two things. First, it’s clear that Baidu’s strike back at Qihoo didn’t have much of an effect on the market. On August 29, Baidu began redirecting 360 Search users to the Baidu homepage when they tried to use Baidu products, and as you can see, after a small blip, Qihoo’s switch to using cached Baidu pages seems to have prevented 360 Search from losing any market share permanently.

The other story this data tells, though, is that 360 Search seems to be plateauing at around ten percent of China’s search market, after some very rapid early growth. On launch, the new service took a pretty significant chunk out of Baidu’s share, but since then, it seems, both companies have more or less held steady. None of the other minor competitors in the arena seem to have experienced much change either, which leaves us more or less where we were before all this began, with Baidu still strongly dominating China’s search market.

The Hitwise graph above is a bit misleading, because it lists Baidu’s image search as a separate service. This is probably to compensate for the fact that 360 Search doesn’t have an image search function; but if we’re talking about the overall search market in China, the full picture looks more like this:

[via Sina Tech]