Hey hey! Perhaps Baidu's English language search results might be incrementally less horrendous now: "Chinese search giant Baidu Inc. will use Microsoft's Bing for some English-language results as the software giant tries to expand its small share of China's search market. No financial details of the tie-up between Microsoft Corp. and Baidu were released. Baidu has 75.8 percent of China's search market while Google has 19.2 percent, according to Analysys International, a Beijing research firm. Bing's China market share is so small that Analysys counts it among "others" that have a total of 2.2 percent. In a statement, Baidu vice president Samuel Shen said the agreement with Bing will improve English search for Baidu users and raise Bing's profile in China. Baidu says its site already handles about 10 million English searches daily. Baidu operates a search site in Japan but makes nearly all its revenue in China. Its profit for the first quarter of 2011 more than doubled from a year earlier to 1.07 billion yuan ($163.5 million). Last month, the company announced it was investing $306 million in Qunar, a Chinese travel search engine, to become the company's majority shareholder." [China Daily] more ›

Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant behind Taobao, launched a beta version of it's own search engine, called Etao, last Saturday. The move may be seen as a direct challenge to Baidu, who currently dominate 60% of the search market in China. Described as a "shopping search engine," Etao will also offer a comprehensive search option powered by Microsoft's Bing. With 40% of Alibaba owned by Yahoo, this could be seen as the first big move by foreign investment to fill the hole left by Google.cn's departure. more ›

The big piece of news over the weekend is that Google is now, in fact, 99.9% certain it will be shutting down its China search engine operations after negotiations... well, didn't go so well? more ›

Google and Yahoo have long been lambasted for the censorship policies they employ in China to appease the CCP, particularly when Yahoo handed over email information to party officials in order to convict a Chinese journalist. Now critics have shifted their attention to Microsoft's Bing search engine. more ›