Search engine giant Google said on December 12, 2012, that it will shut down its shopping search service in China. This will mark the second time in the past three months the US-based search engine has closed its services in a market which is considered to be the world’s most populous internet consumer base.
Google, in a statement said that the shopping service “Was not providing businesses with the level of impact we had hoped”. Earlier, the company cited the same reason in the month of September when it shut down the music search service in China. The market share of Google in China had decreased since the shutdown of its search engine in 2010.
Analysts have even said that the steady loss might lead the company to reduce its product offerings in the Asian country even further. The market share for Google peaked in the fourth quarter of 2009, when the company had 35.9 percent of the Chinese Search market. However, their shares then began declining drastically and shrank in 2010, after which Google got into a spat with the Chinese Government. The company then decided to shut down its search engine that was running from the Chinese mainland and redirect users to a Hong Kong-based search engine.
