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Microsoft to partner China’s biggest search engine Baidu
Business digest: agreement gives Microsoft access to 470 million internet users
Microsoft has reached an agreement to partner China's biggest search engine, Baidu.com. The deal will see Microsoft's search engine Bing provide English-language search services for the Chinese site.
Baidu has over 83 per cent of the Chinese-language online search market, but is increasingly receiving English-language searches: 10 million a day, to be precise. A partnership with Bing offers the Chinese site a chance to meet this growing demand.
"More and more people here are searching for English terms," Baidu's spokesman Kaiser Kuo explained. "But Baidu hasn’t done a good job. So here’s a way for us to do it."
For Microsoft, the opportunity is huge. The deal gives them access to China's 470 millions internet users – already the biggest online population in the world. The agreement also comes a year and a half after Google, Microsoft’s biggest search rival, pulled out of China.
Read a full report in the New York Times. ·
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Profits trumps principles once again. Through its facilitation of the fascist regime in China- censoring information such as the cover-up of SARS and other epidemics, allowing the regime to access users' hotmail accounts, providing technology that supports the control and subjugation of people, offering a respectable face to a state that shows open contempt for human rights- Microsoft once again demonstrates that it would have used the same excuses it uses today to justify its partnership with the Nazis. It is absolutely disgusting that another American company is willing to spit on its' country's values to make a fast buck in the here-and-now.