China Watch Blog has learnt that Google Inc may face a new challenge in China as Microsoft Corp, its main rival in the United States, and Baidu Inc, China’s biggest search engine, are joining forces against it in the world’s largest Internet market.
Microsoft will provide English-language results from its Bing search engine on Baidu “within this year”, China Daily reported, citing the two companies as saying in a news release on Monday.
The announcement comes at a time that Google’s market share in China is falling and Baidu is trying turn that to its advantage to dominate the country’s search market.
Zhang Dongchen, Baidu assistant president, said about 10 million English-language searches are made on Baidu every day, mainly by professionals and university students in China.
By cooperating with Microsoft, he said the two companies can provide “the best search experience” for users.
Marsha Wang, spokeswoman for Google China, declined to comment.
While Baidu dominates online searches in China, it has long lagged behind Google in English-language searches.
The cooperation with Microsoft may help it make up for this and complicate Google’s development in China, analysts said.
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