China's top Web search firm Baidu.com Inc plans to launch a research and development centre in Shanghai as early as this year, an industry source said on Wednesday, as it seeks to fend off rival Google in the world's second-largest Web market.
Baidu -- which is ramping up a fledgling Japanese service and investing $15 million in Asia's largest economy -- is also preparing to launch an R&D centre in Tokyo after the Shanghai centre, said the source, who was briefed on the plan.
Wow. They are really becoming aggressive in Japan. There is already a lot of competition here with Yahoo and Google. Plus the government funded search engine will come out sometime in the future.
It is cool though they are challenging this market.
I've yet to meet an average Japanese user who knows that there's a Japanese version of Baidu available. Their next step should probably allot a bit for marketing. ;)
From the Japan side they could be a sleeping tiger if they keep developing their algo. Their SERPs are still mercifully free of ads and their interface is very clean...like the Google of old. I'm still not too thrilled with the relevance of the SERPS for the keywords I follow. Maybe I've just become too used to the Yahoo and Google offerings for Japanese search. ;)
I would like the think that Baidu are going to do a good job in Japan. All of the native Japanese efforts at search died in the face of Google and Yahoo. There's a government effort in Japan to make a search engine comparable to the commercial giants, but to date its vaporware. It's refreshing to see a local SE grow to such prominence.
What do you think makes Baidu so competitive in the double byte market?
