Market-savvy Chinese firms spent 1.72 billion yuan (215 million U.S. dollars) advertising on search engine websites in the first half of the year, a leading industry research agency said on Aug 23.

Major search engines including Baidu, Yahoo and Google enjoyed a 52.9 percent rise in revenues from China. An increasing number of domestic firms are investing in marketing and advertising, and individual companies are upping their advertising budgets.

Search engine marketing will continue to grow. With more than 20 million potential customers among Chinese firms and the search engine market is still very small. As search engine advertising develops, the market will expand.