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 ›

Looking to have your internet regulated even more by the government? No problem because People’s Daily, the highly controlled state run newspaper, just announced the launch of its new online search engine “Jike”. more ›

...And it's on a competing Chinese search engine! Wang Ling, a computer scientist at SOSO.com, a site that's suspiciously laid out very similarly to the one currently having troubles in this country, has developed a bioinformatics search engine that mimics the way Chinese characters are indexed. Wait, what? more ›

Our favorite method of buying things online now has its own search engine, and is it just us or does it remind you of Google? As of yet, it only searches for things on Taobao, but apparently it'll include organic searches with "bid-ranked positions." The company said it created the search engine, and blocked search results to Baidu, Google and Yahoo in an attempt to eliminate fraud. Personally, we can't see how it's much different from just searching things on the regular site, but we're intrigued by the fact that it may be offered on mobile phones as well. Buying things on the go? Egads, that sounds dangerous... for our wallets. more ›

Baidu rolled a new feature as of yesterday—a person of the month, which you can see in their logo. They say that they pick the person based on searches done in their engine, so it's a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis. This month it's Xu Sanduo (许三多), a character from a popular TV series called Soldier Sortie(士兵突击), which has become one of the more popular shows... more ›