I stumbled upon this news from Marbridge Consulting that reported Baidu is seeking to acquire an English search engine. It’s true, we just confirmed it with Baidu. Although there is an intention to acquire, there isn’t a suitable fit at the moment. The search goes on.
“This (acquisition) was something that CEO Robin Li mentioned during an Internet summit in Shenzhen,” Kaiser Kuo, spokesman of Baidu told us through an email.
“We were looking for an English-language search property but weren’t able to find anything at the time. We’ve made clear that we’re developing our search capabilities in multiple languages, and English is among them,” he added.
Kuo declined to give further details about the acquisition plan.
Despite having over 80% market share in China, Baidu isn’t as popular as Google on the international stage. In my opinion, having a multi-language search engine could help Baidu penetrate quickly in countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Korea and Vietnam where majority still use their national languages on the Internet. However, the search technology for multi languages (imagine English, Indonesian, Thai, Korean) aren’t going to come cheap.
Besides search, Baidu is continuously looking to expand its business portfolio in the e-commerce sector. It has recently closed down Youa but is set to launch another e-commerce site which will leverage on its search capabilities. The recent piracy content problem between Wenku and a group of influential Chinese authors has also kept Baidu busy. But things seem to be getting better as we learned that a filtering system will be put in place soon to monitor and remove pirated content. Kudos to Baidu for that.
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