Looking for a little traction in China, Microsoft has partnered with the country’s largest online retailer, Taobao.com (whose parent company is Alibaba Group, owners of Yahoo China). The site, Etao, has launched in a public beta version and is a shopping search engine that will display results on a range of categories and will be powered by Bing. Since Microsoft already has a Chinese version of Bing, advertisers can now place ads through Bing and they will also reach English speaking countries. To aid with the language difference, a dictionary feature has been implemented that allows for translations.
Even though these are good steps to get Bing to become a search force in China, Microsoft has a lot of ground to cover. Baidu holds first place at 70% and at a very distant second is Google, who only holds 24% of the search share.
