Google Inc will recruit an "impressively huge number" of new employees in China next year to do research, despite the world's biggest online search engine transferring its Chinese mainland search pages to its Hong Kong website in March.

The United States-based search giant will hire more people for e-commerce and mobile applications such as LBS (location based service).

To tap into the new business, Google, which has launched a products search service on its English website, has set up a team for e-commerce search in China.

"It's the best year ever in hiring in 2010, and we will increase payroll next year," Boon-Lock Yeo, head of Google China's Engineering & Research division, said yesterday.

Yeo declined to be more specific on the actual number of hires.

In the mobile phone market Google, the developer of the Android operating system, plans to develop applications on LBS to help users search shops and friends nearby.

Besides LBS, Google will also focus on mobile advertising as it's the fastest growing sector, Yeo said.

Google China now has several hundred engineers working in Beijing and Shanghai to mainly focus on search and advertising.

Google China's research team makes up the largest R&D center in Asia.

In January, Google unexpectedly threatened to quit from the mainland market because of alleged government search result censorship requirement.

In March, it started to redirect mainland users to its uncensored Hong Kong search site. The move caused uncertainties in Google China's business and prompted its clients and partners to migrate to rival companies.