May 31, 2004

Baidu has beaten Google, in becoming the fourth largest Internet website in the world in terms of web traffic, according to the latest Alexa traffic rankings.

Another leading Chinese search engine, 3721.com, ranked seventh.

Baidu.com claims that it has become the world's largest Chinese language search engine with over 300 mln Chinese language website pages, and over 60 mln page hits every day.

In China, it covers over 95% of Chinese netizens, with more than 80 mln users. According to Shanghai-based Internet research house, iResearch, Baidu.com has a market share of 48.2% in China in terms of search engine traffic, while the global Internet search giant Google.com accounts for only 29.8%.

Baidu.com has accelerated its expansion in China, with staff numbers doubled to over 300 from around 100 one year ago, Zhu Hongbo, COO of Baidu.com, told Interfax. Apart from traditional search services, the company launched or is planning to launch several new services.

The latest addition to its services, "Posted Message Bar", enables users to search messages on various Chinese BBS, while the under-testing "Download Bar" service enables users to share files with other netizens for free mutual downloads.

Other new services include weather information, with which a user can search a city's weather and have exact weather information displayed on the top of the search result list, rather than from a link to this information.

"All these new services aim to bring convenience to netizens. They are free of charge, but they will be helpful to boost our page views and improve our website popularity," Zhu pointed out.

Source: Interfax

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.