Broadening the borders of their battlefield, the heavy hitters of the English-language Web are getting ready to duke it out on new turf as Excite Inc. (XCIT) follows Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) onto the Chinese-language Web. SinaSearch by Excite will be unveiled on Wednesday.
The Chinese-language portal site is the product of a partnership between Excite and Sinanet.com, which bills itself as "the homepage for global Chinese." The two companies announced an alliance Monday to create a service that will allow users to search in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters.
The deal comes just a month after the 4 May launch of Yahoo Chinese and a few weeks after Netscape Communications (NSCP) announced plans to launch a Chinese-language Internet guide with the Hong Kong-based China Internet Corp. Netscape nemesis Microsoft Corp. has also been active, setting up Chinese partnerships and ventures.
"It's still relatively wide open, so it makes sense for everybody to be running into the foreign markets [while they're still developing]," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, a site that keeps tabs on the industry. "It makes sense particularly when [portal players] have good local partners," Sullivan said.
Brett Bullington, executive vice president at Excite, had a slightly different take. "It looks like everyone is just rushing into all these [foreign] markets," he said. "But we are really just starting with what we have and building out."
SinaSearch will use proprietary Excite Web search technology, and draw on Sinanet.com's established presence in the nascent Chinese-speaking Web market. With some 1.2 million page views per day, and approximately 600,000 unique visitors per month, Sinanet is the number one brand name on the Chinese-language Web, according to the company's chief financial officer, Diom Lim.
But number one looks like a shaky position at this point.
The pool of Chinese speakers on the Web is still comparatively small -- 7 million total, of which 3 million are from Taiwan, 1.5 million are from China, 850,000 are from Hong Kong, 650,000 are from the United States, and the rest are scattered about Southeast Asia and Singapore, according to statistics gathered by the Taiwanese government, Chinese news agencies, and independent marketing agencies. The US Web universe, meanwhile, had passed 57 million by early May, according to RelevantKnowledge.
And if leadership in other foreign markets are any indication, Yahoo is the one to beat, according to Sullivan. "When you get demographic surveys of who's doing well with national sites, Yahoo always tends to stand way ahead," Sullivan said, while admitting that such surveys and marketing data for foreign markets are hard to come by.
Sinanet�s Lim doesn�t sound too concerned about losing ground to the top dog of the English-language Web, however. "Yahoo basically beat everyone to the punch in the international market," said Lim. "Excite thought, 'Gosh, they beat us to the punch again.' But then they saw Sinanet as an opportunity to partner with someone that could actually allow them to leapfrog Yahoo."
As Yahoo founder Jerry Yang was visiting Taiwan to promote the launch of Yahoo Chinese, Excite and Sinanet were frantically working to get their deal signed, Lim said.
Now that the deal is done, the stage is set for the numbers one and two US Web brands to "duke it out in China," Lim said. And with the United States�s second-ranked search site tag-teaming with the number one Chinese-language site to take on the top-ranked search site in the US, Lim said he likes the odds.
The terms of the partnership between Excite and Sinanet.com were not disclosed. Excite executive vice president Brett Bullington said only that the two companies would work out a revenue-sharing arrangement.
Eventually, Lim said he expects Excite to independently establish its own Chinese portal presence. "There is definitely a certain amount of co-opetition," he said.
But Lim said the partnership allows Sinanet.com to build on a lead that already amounts to a year's head start. That will put the self-proclaimed "premier" Chinese Web portal in good position as the number of Chinese speakers on the Web is expected to grow to 20 million by 2001.
