Microsoft has partnered with China’s largest online retailer Taobao.com, using Bing to power the web results for its new shopping search engine Etaosite.
Taobao, which is a part of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, launched Etao as a public beta version, calling it a shopping search engine.
The site also offers a range of search categories, including general web results that are powered by Bing.
Microsoft already has a Chinese version of its Bing search engine, also still in its beta version, but it currently holds an extremely small share of the search engine market at less than one percent, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.
Baidu currently ranks as the most popular search engine in China at 70 percent, with Google a far second at 24 percent.
Microsoft has been working to steadily improve its Bing platform for China. On the advertising front, Chinese businesses can now place ads through the Bing search engine for English-speaking countries to reach potential customers overseas.
For businesses wanting to market their products domestically, Microsoft has partnered with Baidu to sell ads on the Chinese version of its Bing search engine.
The company has also integrated a new dictionary feature, originally called Engkoo, into Bing, allowing users to look up words and find translations in Chinese Mandarin or English.
Alibaba Group, Taobao’s parent company, has already worked to acquire search engine technology in the past. In August, the company agreed to buy a stake in a search engine operated by one of the country’s major online portals, Sohu.com Inc.
Alibaba is also the owner of Yahoo China, which it acquired as part of deal in 2005 that gave Yahoo a 40 percent stake in the Chinese company. Alibaba took control of the site in order to gain access to the search engine technology, Alibaba.com CEO David Wei said last month.
