Baidu is China’s biggest independent Internet search engine and is one of Google’s strongest rivals in China. Its music search tool is considered one of the country’s best.
But it faces growing competition both from other Chinese search engines, such as Sohu.com, and from foreign giants like Google and Yahoo, which has an alliance with Beijing 3721 via a Hong Kong partner of the Chinese Internet service provider.
“From Google’s perspective, it saw Yahoo acquiring 3721 and may have felt prompted to make a move,” said Duncan Clark, managing director of the BDA China Ltd. consultancy in Beijing.
Seems like more and more ways to keep the drag races between the big search players going in more and more markets and in more and more areas of functionality. In a way it seems almost too bad. Google is so strong (Microsoft multi-billion dollar worries aside) at this point it was nice to have a successful upstart that kept it on its toes.
That’s all well and good, but doesn’t operating in China mean following their censorship laws? It’s sort of the internet equivalent of supporting apartheid.