Yahoo! ready to take on Baidu search engine

Yahoo! ready to take on Baidu search engine

Jack Ma, chief executive officer of Alibaba.com has announced that they are ready to take on the leaders of the search engine market in the Chinese market Baidu.com. He manages the Chinese portal of the search engine giant Yahoo! and he has now announced a new strategy based on promoting the site as a search engine to counter the popularity of Baidu. This just goes on to show how important china has become as a market with its 100 million web users.

Yahoo! recently bought 40% stake in the Alibaba.com. As a result, Alibaba is now managing the Chinese version of the Yahoo’s China sites. They have unveiled a redesigned, simplified Chinese-language Yahoo site that focuses on a search box and drops entertainment listings and other features of the earlier site. Ma said in a statement: “What we are doing is sending out a strong signal to China, to the Yahoo team: ‘We are focused and we are coming.”

He also said what the company has already officially conveyed. Ma said that the company would cooperate with the communist authorities if they sought information on “politically sensitive information” sent by a Yahoo e-mail customer. It becomes important for them to comply with the government policies considering the rules and regulations are very strict in the country.

Alibaba.com, based in Hangzhou city southwest of Shanghai, runs online commerce sites that link foreign buyers with Chinese wholesalers.