Baidu teams up with Microsoft for English searches

Chinese web giant Baidu said on Monday it had reached an agreement with Microsoft to provide English-language results generated by the US software giant's Bing search engine. Some English search requests from Baidu users will be automatically directed to Bing and its results will be displayed in pages in Baidu's search engine, the Chinese company said in a statement. "The cooperation between Baidu and Bing will bring into play technological advantages of both parties and jointly provide best search experience for users who need to search in English," Baidu senior executive Zhang Dongchen said. The move will also help Baidu to explore the overseas Internet search market, Zhang said, without elaborating. Baidu receives around 10 million English-language search requests a day, mostly from professionals and students in major cities, Zhang said. The Chinese search engine and Bing are expected to start offering the service later this year, the statement said. Baidu is the dominant search engine in China, the world's biggest online market with at least 477 million Internet users, according to official data. Google has lost part of its share of the lucrative Chinese search market to Baidu since the US web giant last year engaged in a very public spat with Beijing over cyberattacks that it claimed had originated from China. Baidu had a 75.8-percent share of China's overall search market in the first quarter of 2011, dwarfing Google's dwindling 19.2 percent, according to figures from research firm Analysys International.