Google was having problems in China since 2010. Although 82% of China's smartphone run on Android, it only has 20% share in the mobile search market.
Google's trouble begun in March 2010 with China's censorship demands. This made Google unhappy so it routed China search queries to its uncensored servers in Hong Kong. Afterwards, it became under pressure with cyber attacks to its servers, its search engine being dropped from internet portals, and declarations of the Android being too dominant in China.
However, the real problem that should concern Google was the risk of its competitors using its mess in China as a blueprint to woo its market in the US, according to Roger Friedman of the Motley Fool.
Last April, Bing, Google's competitor, reached an all-time high at more than 17% of core market searches. Meanwhile, Yahoo rose 11.8%. However, this was at Google's expense, whose search market share dropped 0.6% to 66.5%.
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