According to an article from Sina.com (in Mandarin), Yahoo! China has launched a project with the codename “Domino”, where an upgrade version of Web search, community services, and vertical search are included in this project. Moreover, this Domino project will be regarded as the new strategic option that Yahoo! China’s Web strategy right now. It is not a surprise move by Yahoo! China as they still far lag behind Baidu’s market share in China. According to an article from NBD.com.cn (in Mandarin), Yahoo! China Search Group which comprised of Yahoo! China Search, yiso, 3721, their market share is only entitled to 23% whereas Baidu’s market share is 36% in China, according to the survey done by iClick. However, the details about this Domino project has not been unveil to the public at this moment.

It seems like there is a dull moment for Yahoo! China. With the combined three search engines, i.e. Yahoo! China Search, yiso, and 3721, they already lag behind Baidu to the second place in the search industry. But don’t forget about Google China that holding the leadership position in the global search except China market. I am thinking that the Domino project is served as a plan to aggregate great contents and thus, the Chinese surfers will not get anything else. Yet the market share stated in the above showed that Yahoo! China is truly holding no real advantages today.

In overall, the long-run business model for Yahoo! China in the search industry is unclear now. As the Alibaba Group acquired Yahoo! China and formed a long-term strategic partnership in October 2005, they still failed to compete with Baidu. And now Baidu has became the standard, and hence Yahoo! China need to implement a totally different Internet strategy. It’s no longer the vision of win the Web search wars, the corporate mantra going forward would be “win the Web communities wars.”