They may have already put Google to the sword in their native China, but it seems that Baidu.com, China's largest internet search engine, may be planning to enter the big league and expand their operation into Europe in an announcement planned for later this month.According to a Sunday Telegraph report, the announcement will come from Baidu CFO Shawn Wang at a Nasdaq investor conference in London on 19 June, where Wang is a scheduled speaker. Although the report did not offer details of Baidu's plans or timescales, it did suggest that Baidu would be targeted towards younger internet users.
Baidu has a massive non-English language following, with around 59 million users per month, but still finds itself dwarfed by Google on a worldwide scale, which attracts around 73 per cent of the 635 million web searches made each month globally. However, in China, Google trails behind Baidu by over 15 million users.
Earlier this year, Baidu set up a Japanese search engine but found most early visitors to the Japanese portal actually came from China - primarily in search of pornography which had been censored by Baidu's Chinese search engine. In response, Chinese internet regulators have since reportedly blocked access to Baidu Japan.
Baidu has already formed alliances with overseas companies, including EMI, the world's largest independent music company. In January this year, the companies announced a revenue-sharing agreement which allows Baidu's users to access songs free of charge from EMI's Typhoon Music label.
At the end of 2006, China already held an estimated 137 million web surfers and reports suggest that China could soon overtake the United States as the world's largest web market, in terms of the number of users.
However, Bob Ivens, managing director of internet traffic measurement firm comScore, has said that Baidu may find its plans for westward expansion "a huge challenge".
"These guys have drifted into the top 30 of the world rankings, but that is purely down to the size of the Chinese market."
Alongside their continued acquisitions of fledgling internet technology, the 'big three' - Google, Yahoo! and MSN - enjoy the lion's share of the web search market in the West. But while Baidu has been buoyed by its success in holding firm against Google, MSN and Yahoo! in its own market-place, it remains to be seen just how the Chinese search engine will cope with the entirely different user base they will encounter with such an expansion.
