Recruiting in China

BEIJING: Google, owner of the world's most-used Internet search site, is planning to more than double the number of engineers it has in China to help win users in the world's second- biggest Internet market.

The company aims to have between 200 and 300 engineers in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai in a year's time, Google China's president, Lee Kai-fu, said after a press briefing Friday in Beijing. Google has more than 100 engineers in the nation, he said.

Google plans to hire "thousands of people" for its Beijing development center to create services for China's more than 137 million Internet users, the company's chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, said last April. The Mountain View, California, company added online map and Internet spreadsheet services last month in a bid to catch Beijing's Baidu.com, which has a China market share three times larger than Google's.

"Google is already hiring people away from Baidu," Florian Pihs, assistant vice-president at the Beijing-based researcher Analysys International, said Friday by telephone.

"Google is after people who are highly coveted not only by Baidu," but by Microsoft other companies, Pihs said.

The search company is planning to open a development center in Shanghai this summer, Google's Lee said, declining to provide further details. An announcement about the center will be made in a few weeks, he said.

In the fourth quarter, Google's share of the Chinese search market rose to 17 percent from 16 percent in the previous three-month period, according to Analysys. Baidu's share rose to 58 percent from 57 percent, while Yahoo!'s was unchanged at 13 percent.

Google on Friday began offering a service that allows users to search for information in Chinese-language books, Lee said. The company began offering search services for mobile phones in December last year in partnership with China Mobile, the nation's biggest wireless carrier.

In January, Google bought a stake in Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology, a Chinese company that helps users download movies, music and software from the Internet.

Baidu's search revenue could grow 15 percent on a quarterly basis during 2007, slower than Google's rate in China of between 20 percent and 25 percent, according to a Feb. 2 Credit Suisse report.

By Dune Lawrence and John Liu Bloomberg