BEIJING - Google Inc., owner of the world's most popular Internet search engine, is struggling to become a verb in China.
"G-O-O-G-L-E is not a normal Chinese spelling, and people don't pronounce it right," Kai-fu Lee, Google's president for Greater China, said in a Nov. 30 interview in Beijing. "Most people call us 'go go.' "
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, so well known in most countries that the Oxford English Dictionary lists its name as a verb, has less than half of Baidu.com Inc.'s 61 percent market share in China. Lee, recruited from Microsoft Corp. in 2005 to expand Google in China, said he will try new advertising strategies to overcome the language barrier. He declined to provide more information.
China, the second-largest Internet market, with 162 million users, may overtake the United States in three to five years, according to am Oppenheimer & Co. analyst. Online advertising, the source of 99 percent of Google's revenue, may quadruple to $2.7 billion in China in the four years ending in 2010, says Beijing-based Analysys International.
Google search revenue in China last year accounted for less than 1 percent of the company's $7.3 billion total in 2006, Credit Suisse Group estimated in June.
Internet addresses in China are based on the Hanyu Pinyin system, which translates Chinese characters into roman letters. Sounds such as "gle" don't exist.
"That's a big problem for us," Lee said.
Google last year acquired the "G.cn" domain so users who misspell its name are still directed to its Chinese-language website, Guge, or "harvesting song." The adoption of the name in 2006 prompted criticism it was a song about something going downhill because "gu" also means valley.
"It's a name that would appear to have been picked by someone who doesn't know Chinese," said Liu Bin, an analyst at Beijing-based researcher BDA China Ltd.
Baidu, meaning "hundreds of times," widened its market-share lead to 61 percent from 57 percent after offering bulletin boards and an encyclopedia, according to Analysys estimates. Google's share rose to 24 percent, from 16.
