Baidu more a media company every day
January 29, 2007

I've been interested to watch some of the recent moves being made by Baidu, China's leading search engine. Baidu has already distinguished itself by trouncing Google in the China market in terms of share of searches made, and in building loyalty among Chinese users. In the past year or so it has also eased into various other areas, including a localized and somewhat controversial knockoff of Wikipedia, blogs, online video and a host of other content. Now, with a new deal with EMI and a license to gather and report its own news, Baidu is stepping deeper into the media waters.

In fact, like Google and Yahoo, Baidu is already really a media company in all but name. Like those other companies, its revenue is derived mainly from packaging ads along with content that people want. But the new deals move it much more into traditional media territory.

--more at CNET Asia--