By Chris Chang, posted Mar 31, 2011 at 3:23 PM, 242 views,

Sina Ditches Google’s Search Service

Man, remember when Sina and Google announced a partnership back in 2007 to help Google battle China’s dominating search engine, Baidu? Both companies made a perfect match, since Google provides web page search service for Sina’s search box, and in return, Sina shares their advertising revenue generated by traffic with Google. Today, Sina has abandoned Google’s search engine and started using its own search technology instead.

According to Liu Qi, Sina’s vice president of marketing, Sina replaced Google’s service with their own search technology because the contract between Sina and Google has already expired last month. Sina’s own search engine, iAsk, which used to serve only vertical search, or specialized search, is now on the home page of Sina.com as the main search engine for images, news, music, and media.

Just in case you want to know more about iAsk, it is actually a crappy search engine. The speed is slow compare to Baidu, and search results are mostly limited to China. The most terrible thing about iAsk is that Sina’s own search results get very high priority in there. However, searching is not the main feature of iAsk. Sina created it to let users to ask a question and get answered by other users through the service.

Back to the story, Google declined to comment on Sina’s move, but said,

“While we can’t comment on specific partnerships, we announced last year that over time we would not be syndicating censored search to partners in China after fulfilling our contractual commitments.”

You probably know the bad relationship between Google and the Chinese government. Ever since Google disagreed with the request of censoring search results in China and redirected all users from its Google.cn page to its unfiltered Hong Kong search engine, the Chinese government treats Google as black-listed foreign company. Any Chinese companies working with Google will also be treated as a black-listed company. So, Sina is now trying their best to put a stop to their friendship with Google, to prevent any misunderstandings with the mighty Chinese government. Aww…

Source: The Next Web