Yahoo China closed its music search service Sunday, as it continues to lose ground in the Chinese search engine and news portal markets.
Yahoo China made the move on the heels of Google Inc's shutdown of its China-only music search service in December.
"Due to a modification of our product strategy, Yahoo's music service was shut down on January 20, 2013, and no further service will be offered," Yahoo China said in a message displayed on the former Yahoo Music website.
Yahoo China, which is wholly owned by China's biggest corporate e-commerce provider Alibaba Group, does the majority of its Chinese business in the search engine and news portal arenas.
However, the company's share of the search engine market has been slipping over the past three years.
Yahoo China is currently the country's second largest search engine by market share, with its share sliding from 29.5 percent in the first quarter of 2010 to 14.6 percent in the third quarter of 2012, according to data released by Beijing-based Internet research firm iResearch.
Baidu, China's largest search engine, held 80.3 percent of the total market share in the third quarter of 2012, up from 67.8 percent in the first quarter of 2010, the data showed.
Yahoo China's popularity as a news portal has also been weakening, currently trailing other portals like Sina and Sohu in the domestic market.
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