While we wait for word coming from Mountain View on today’s Bing announcements, news is out today that Bing is powering web searches on a new e-commerce website in China.
ETao.com returns search results for forums, news, answers, web, and shopping product image search, with Bing only powering the web search section. Bing ads will not be appearing, but an agreement is in place to share revenue from web search ads, according to an article in the Wall St. Journal.
Taobao.com is the largest e-commerce website in China, and last Saturday the site, operated by the Alibaba Group, launched into beta a new ecommerce focused search website called eTao.com. While Baidu.com is the largest search site in China with some 70% market share (Google is next at 24%, and while Bing has a beta version running in China, it lags far behind at less than 1% of search market share), Taobao handles 75% of e-commerce transactions in China, and they expect to double the value of those transactions this year to 400 billion Yuan (about 60 billion US dollars).
The new search site is not expected to pose much of a threat to Baidu, yet, but Taobao holds a dominant position in e-commerce. The two are in fierce competition, apparently, and Taobao has blocked Baidu from searching on its properties. Another Chinese company, Tencent, which runs the popular IM service QQ, also has both e-commerce and search sites.
(source: The Wall St. Journal)