Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2011. The search market shares (Baidu 75%, Google 18%, Microsoft 4%) and the state of Google’s conflict with China date from then.
China’s search giant, Baidu, has partnered with Microsoft to offer an English-language search engine to users in China. China is the world’s largest internet market, and when it comes to web searches, Baidu is the choice of 75% of users, followed by Google with 18%.
With this alliance, Microsoft will have the chance to increase its presence in the search business, where its share has so far been a meagre 4%. Whenever a user in China runs an English-language search on Baidu, they will automatically be sent to Bing results.
The alliance makes things even harder for Google’s business in China, where its services face more and more censorship and the conflicts between the two sides keep growing. Even so, some analysts believe that Bing‘s growth from this deal will be fairly small, since English-language searches from China are very limited.
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Featured image: N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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