Microsoft, Baidu expand web-search partnership

Microsoft (MSFT.NASDAQ) and Baidu (BIDU.NASDAQ) have agreed to deepen their internet-search partnership in China to take more market share from Google (GOOG.NASDAQ) in the world’s largest internet market, Bloomberg reported. The new agreement will let Baidu users see English-language search results returned by Microsoft’s Bing search engine in China. At present Baidu has no foreign language interface. It does crawl English websites, but most Chinese internet users currently prefer Google for English-language search results. Microsoft previously had a search-engine agreement with Alibaba Group Holdings, which owns popular e-commerce sites Taobao.com and Alibaba.com (1688.HK), but the agreement appears to have quietly lapsed.