Microsoft Forms Partnership With China’s Leading Search Engine

A year and a half after Google pulled its popular search engine out of China, partly over concerns about censorship, its rival Microsoft has struck a deal with China’s biggest search engine,Baidu.com, to offer Web search services in English.

Baidu, previously primarily a Chinese-language search engine, made the announcement Monday afternoon, saying Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, was expected to appear on Baidu’s Web pages by the end of this year.

Baidu, which dominates Chinese-language search services here with about 83 percent of the market, has been trying for years to improve its English-language search services because English searches on its site are as much as 10 million a day, the company said. Now it has a powerful partner.

“More and more people here are searching for English terms,” Kaiser Kuo, the company’s spokesman, said Monday. “But Baidu hasn’t done a good job. So here’s a way for us to do it.”

Baidu and Microsoft did not disclose terms of the agreement. But the new English-language search results will undoubtedly be censored, since Beijing maintains strict controls over Internet companies and requires those operating in China to censor results the government deems dangerous or troublesome, including references to human rights issues and dissidents.

Because Baidu is China’s dominant search engine, Microsoft seems to be betting it can get access to what is already the world’s largest Internet population, more than 470 million users, many of whom use Baidu.

Google continues to be available in China, though its search engine — which operates in English and Chinese — was moved to Hong Kong last year. But lately, Google’s search engine and its e-mail service, Gmail, have become more difficult to access. The company, which is based in Mountain View, California, has blamed the Chinese government for interfering with its operations.

For Microsoft, it could be an opportunity. In a statement released Monday, Shen Xiangyang, Microsoft’s senior global vice president, said: “Bing’s cooperation with Baidu will allow the vast Baidu users to receive better English search experiences and results, and allow more Chinese users to have the search experience of Bing.