Alibaba.com Corporation, one of China's leading e-commerce company, announced Wednesday the re-launch of Yahoo! China, with a new home page and business model focused on search. 

As part of the re-launch, Yahoo! China's search brands, including Yisou.com, have been consolidated and rebranded as "Yahoo! Search".

"Yahoo! China's new direction can be summed up in one key word -- ‘search'," said Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com, which in October acquired the China business of Yahoo! Inc. and became the exclusive licensee to the Yahoo! brand and search technology in China. 

"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."

According to the first quarter study from iResearch, Yahoo! China's search properties had a combined market share of 32 percent as measured by search queries, placing Yahoo! China in the No. 2 position behind Baidu (37 percent) and well ahead of third-place Google (19 percent) in China.

"Search is an integral part of e-commerce," said Ma. "We will soon be launching an aggressive and innovative marketing campaign to promote Yahoo! China as China's leading search destination.  Just as we've surpassed tough competitors to become the market leader in China's business-to-business and consumer e-commerce sectors, we expect Yahoo! China will take the lead in search."

"To get it right locally, you have to have the right team globally. We have a team of world-class, Chinese-speaking engineers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean working to insure we provide Yahoo! China's users with the fastest, most accurate, and most relevant Chinese-language search results," said John Wu, Alibaba.com's Chief Technology Officer.

Yahoo! China now has the capacity to index one billion Chinese language web pages. Its servers have been moved to China to support large scale growth in search traffic on its site.

Alibaba.com was founded in 1999 and is based in Hangzhou, eastern China. The company acquired Yahoo! China in October, 2005.

(China.org.cn November 9, 2005)