(21 August 2007 5:22 pm)

MUMBAI: In a bid to take on current Chinese social networking market leader Baidu.com, Google has acquired a significant stake in China based social networking site Tianya.cn. Although Google did not disclose the size of the investment, media reports claim it to be about 60 per cent.

Google China president Kai-Fu Lee said earlier this month that the company intends to buy two China-focused internet companies and invest in five of them in the next 12 months.

The search engine giant is trying to narrow the gap between Baidu.com that currently dominates the search engine market in China in the second quarter with a 58.1 per cent share followed with a 22.8 per cent share by Google and Yahoo China with 11.6 per cent.

According to estimates, China is the world's second largest internet market with approximately 162 million users.

Tianya.com which is ranked 63rd most popular website in China with over 20 million users, offers services including user blogs, classified advertising, photo hosting, news, sports news and university information.

Using its stake, Google will launch a local version of its answers service called 'Wenda' which means 'ask and answer' in Chinese. In April, the search engine acquired a similar stake in Maxthon, a Chinese internet browser company that competes with Microsoft Internet explorer.

Google has earlier struggled to break into China despite changing its name in the country to 'Gu Ge' and agreeing to the government's conditions on online censorship.

Google recently established an engineering research centre in Shanghai and has won approval from the the Chinese government for a licence to provide internet content in the country.