Microsoft’s Bing Will Power Chinese Search Engine Baidu.

Baidu, China’s preferred selection for search, has announced a replacement subsume Microsoft which will see the search company’s English queries be directed to Bing, with the results being printed to Baidu’s own pages.

Announced Monday, the deal offers Microsoft a path into the Chinese market that it wouldn’t normally have the chance to explorer, and with Google pulling back from the battle in China, Microsoft’s move makes even additional sense.

According to Reuters, Baidu currently accounts for eightieth of the search market within China and with [*fr1] a billion web users, that equates to a substantial variety of consumers.

Baidu has about 80 percent of the search market in China — a nation with almost half a billion Internet users and still only about 30 percent penetration — after Google left mainland China in a high-profile fallout with Beijing over censorship.

Bing — which filters out results in China relating to controversial subjects, such as political dissidents, Taiwan or pornography, to be able to operate in the country — has a negligible share of the market, while Google has nearly 20 percent counting visits to its offshore sites.

Google has all however pulled out of China when a raft of cyber attacks on the company’s services, with Gmail being the most target. The attacks are claimed to originate from within China, and Google’s public spat with the country has been well publicized over the last number of years – clearly Microsoft has no such qualms over handling the Chinese.

Microsoft has so far created no discuss matters, aside from to verify the existence of the deal.

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Posted by Ibrahim on July 5, 2011. Filed under Technology, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.