Report: Bing To Power Baidu English Results

Jul 4, 2011 at 10:12am ET by Greg Sterling

China’s dominant search engine Baidu is trying to expand its reach beyond Chinese-language speakers. Reuters is reporting that Baidu and Microsoft have done a deal that will offer Bing powered English-language results for the Chinese search engine.

It’s not clear whether this is limited to China or will be used in other markets where English is spoken. We’ve asked Microsoft for some additional color and perspective.

Baidu controls roughly 80 percent of the search market in China, according to several sources. Google is second with approximately 19 percent.

A Bloomberg report suggests the Baidu-Bing partnership is limited to providing English results to domestic Chinese users. If so those results will likely face the same censorship rules that Google rebelled against early last year.

We’ll update this post if Microsoft gets back to us.

Postscript: A Microsoft spokesperson offered the following general statement and confirmation of the deal:

Baidu and Microsoft have announced that Bing, Microsoft’s decision engine, will provide English search results to Baidu users in China.

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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TPG

This is yet another WIN for Bing… over Google! Another reason for us marketers to get on to the AdCenter and crack it?!
B.K.

I understand that Microsoft has to be pragmatic and win wherever they can, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to see that a company I like and support will end up following political censorship rules. These barriers to freedom harm people.

On the business aspect of it, Bing seems to be doing better and better all the time. While the results just are not as good as Google’s yet, I hope they can continue to force some competition and compel Google to continue to improve their own search index.