(14 November 2005 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Alibaba.com, which claims to be China's largest e-commerce platform, has announced the re-launch of Yahoo! China.

It has a new home page and business model focussed on search. As part of the re-launch, Yahoo! China's search brands, including Yisou.com, have been consolidated and rebranded as Yahoo! Search.

Last month, Alibaba had acquired the China business of Yahoo! and became the exclusive licensee to the Yahoo! brand and search technology in China. Alibaba CEO, Jack Ma says, "This is the first big step we are taking to reshape the Yahoo! brand in China since taking over its operations. We have successfully married Yahoo!'s world-class search technology with Alibaba.com's expertise in China, to build the best search engine for China's Internet users."The re-launched site, at www.yahoo.com.cn , provides a simplified look and feel with a home page focussed on search.

Alibaba says that Yahoo! China already enjoys a strong second place position in the China search market, on the heels of market leader, Baidu, by only five per cent in terms of market share. According to, the latest available independent study, from iResearch (Q1 2005), Yahoo! China's search properties had a combined market share of 32 per cent as measured by search queries, placing Yahoo! China in the second position behind Baidu (37 per cent) and well ahead of third-place Google (19 per cent) in China.

Yahoo! China now has the capacity to index one billion Chinese language web pages. In the three months, since announcing the Yahoo! China acquisition, Yahoo! China's servers have been moved to China to support large scale growth in search traffic on its site.