Taobao, Chinese E-Commerce company Launches Etao Search Engine

Taobao, the largest Chinese E-Commerce company has launched an online search engine called Etao that is powered by Microsoft’s Bing. Taobao is a unit of the Alibaba Group.

Baidu, China internet users mainly use this search engine, which holds an approximated 60 percent of online searches in China. Google and Baidu are the major players of the chinese internet search market. Both in total occupying 90% of the Chinese online search market

Taobao logo

Google has been on the slide though since the shuttering of its google.cn website, so the introduction of Taobao’s Etao search engine could have come at the perfect time.

One online specialize in China stated that the threat to Baidu has always been there, and Taobao could well win over a large chunk of the search engine market. On the other hand it is believed that technology advances will leave Taobao a few years behind Baidu.

Another major player in China online searching is Sohu, who provide the Sogou search engine. They announced a couple months ago they will sell a portion of its search engine to the Alibaba Group.

Microsoft has been actively trying to deploy their Bing search engine in China for the last few months also, and was searching for a major Chinese e-commerce company to help them take the China online search market. It looks as if Taobao could play that vital role.