Microsoft Partners Up with Baidu in China

Microsoft is partenering up with Chinese giant Baidu for their operations in China. The American company will provide English search results through its search engine Bing to users of Baidu.

While some sources in the media have announced it as a move of Microsoft into China, other media see it as move of Baidu to put more pressure on Google's presence in China.

A spokeman of the company is to have said that it wants to better accomodate the users that search in English, which are some 10 million queries a day.

Surely, the search queries in English will be censored by the government. While Google retreated out of China as a protest to censorship, Microsoft have found common to move into an alliance. An interesting theme for an ethical debate we will not go into at this moment.

In any case, this could make things more difficult for Google's operations in China. As of now, Baidu controls some 76%* of the search engine market in China, while Google's operations (servicing from Hong Kong) amount up to some 19%. Baidu also has a service in Japanese since 2008.

Reasons I could think of for Chinese residents to use Google instead of Baidu are because of the better search results you get when searching with English terms, and because search results are not censored. Now that Bing results are similar to Google's results (because of copying?) there would be less reason to use Google.

What can Google do? One idea is to stick to its morals and provide uncensored information from Hong Kong so they would retain that advantage against local search engines. And to be honest, that's about the only idea I have.