That is one of the biggest stories of today, Microsoft and Alibaba joining hands to launch a search engine in China. The search engine is named as ‘Etao‘ and will provide search result in Chinese language. Alibaba is one of the largest online properties in China. Interesting fact about Alibaba is that it is 40% owned by Yahoo.
A public Beta version is launched on Saturday mainly for the testing purpose. But what about Microsoft’s own search engine Bing ??? Microsoft has been testing a Chinese version of Bing previously. But why they are preferring the partnership of Alibaba instead of their own Bing, we have no answer to that till now.
The Etao search engine will primarily focus on Alibaba’s Taobao site. Taobao is better refereed as the eBay of China. Nothing is sure about what technology is used behind this search engine, it could be Bing, Yahoo Search and/or Sohu’s Sogu search tech, which Alibaba has agreed to purchase previously. At the moment it is confusing all of us.
We have also seen Google China conflict which remained one of the hottest story for few weeks. After that Google shifted their Chinese server to Hong Kong due to the censorship issues.
China was left with their biggest search engine Baidu which is the most dominant search engine in China even in the presence of Google.
Let us see what level of performance the Redmond company is going to show in China with the search engine. Microsoft is well appreciated in China due to Windows Live Messenger which is used by many business people.
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