When most people think of search engines for the Web, they probably think of the likes of Google, MSN and Yahoo. If they really know their search engines then they may also think about the likes of "Ask Jeeves" or "Tecoma". Maybe due to their location, there is a particular one that they like or perhaps they prefer to search using an industry-based search engine. Whatever may be the case, they are probably not using "Baidu" and possibly have never even heard of it until now, though Google holds almost 2.5% of stake in Baidu.

Baidu launched on the NASDAQ last year and rose 350% in its opening day of tradingclearly there are a lot of people who think Baidu is an important player as far as global search engines go. There are nearly 1.5 billion Mandarin speaking Chinese globally and Baidu is the pre-eminent Chinese search engine. Mandarin Chinese is the number one spoken language in the world. There are 311 million English-speaking users on the Web but hot on their. Heels are the 132 million Chinese-speaking users. These two groups are number one and number two respectively, with the Chinese growing at over 300% in the last five years and closing the gap fast.

Now before you charge off and think about optimizing your website for Baidu, there is one small problem - Baidu pretty well searches in just Chinese. Try it for yourself. Feel free to key in English wordsthey can be searched but that is not really what it is set up for. If you don't read or write Chinese characters, then find a Web-page with some Chinese characters and cut and paste them into the search engine. Press "search" and see just how many hits you get. Staggering, isn't it?

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