Baidu-New European Search Engine?

Baidu.com, China’s leading search engine, plans to make great steps towards expanding in Europe this year. It is currently the 4th biggest website in the world, and has a market value of $3 billion.

In China’s internet market, “62.1% users choose Baidu as their first choice search engine, while Google China only covers a percentage of 25.3% last year.” according to the CNNIC report. After significant success in China, their target has now moved to Europe.

Baidu hopes they can beat Google in Europe like they did in China. Mr Shawn Wang , Baidu’s CFO, will make an announcement with the details of their European expansion plans at a Nasdaq investor conference in London on the 19th June, including information on when the company plans to launch a European site and what language the site would use. A report in the Sunday Telegraph pointed out that “Baidu’s planned site will be targeted at younger internet users in a bid to compete with Google in Europe.” However, Baidu officials haven’t make any comment on this yet.

Personally, I think it’s great to see a new European search engine and it will be interesting to see how Baidu competes with Google when they don’t have the home advantage of nationalism. In addition, Search Engine Optimising sites for Baidu is done in a different way from Google. For example, it doesn’t like simple key words/phrases in the title tags, but prefers a descriptive short sentence instead. Whether Baidu succeeds or not, it will be a great influence on the European search engine market and on us as well.

Lili
SEO Programmer