According to reports from Reuters, China’s largest search engine Baidu has made a deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing.
Bing will now provide English language search results on Baidu in China.
This deal quite obviously implies that Baidu is desirous of spreading their reach beyond the traditional Chinese speaking market.
As of now, Baidu controls about 80% of the market share in China, followed by Google which holds about 19% share in the Chinese search engine market.
Following a dispute over censorship issues, with the Chinese government last year, Google had put a halt to their operations in China. Users who now enter search terms in the search bar are directed to Google’s Hong Kong search site.
In the worldwide market, Google controls about 91.07% of the search market, while Bing controls only about 3.21%. The tie up with Baidu, will give Bing access to China’s internet user base, which has been estimated to be around 480 million, thus improving their over all market share a little.
It is most likely that Bing will have to follow the censorship guidelines, Google had earlier objected to.
Financial details of the Bing Baidu partnership are not yet available.
