Baidu Targets Japanese Market

Top Chinese search engine, Baidu, announced plans on Monday to enter the Japanese market in the near future.

Baidu had been developing Japanese-language search technology for the past six months. Created in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, Baidu's mission is, "to provide the best way for people to find information online, including Chinese language web pages, news, images and multimedia files though links provided on our website. In addition to serving individual Internet search users, we also provide an effective platform for businesses to reach potential customers online." Baidu is the fourth most viewed search engine in the entire world, holding 60 percent of the Chinese market, and they hope to use their non-English language search engine to reach the comparable Japanese market. China has a population of 1.3 billion, of which there are 130 million Internet users, and are second in the online market only to America. Japan's population, as of 2005, is 127. 76 million according Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Autmn Davis is a staff writer for Murdok covering ebusiness and technology.