Chinese search engine Baidu.com launched its news service last
night on self-produced contents to increase its traffic rather than
just diverting Web users to other news sites.
The news service - its launch comes almost one year after it was
granted the license to do news - presently covers only finance in
eight areas including stocks, funds and personal financing
management. It can be accessed at stock.baidu.com, fund.baidu.com
and money.baidu.com.
"Seen from this year's statistics (of searched key words), Web
users greatly need financial information, which prompts us to
launch the service," said Baidu in a statement.
Searches for financial information on Baidu, China's most
popular search engine, have seen more than 100 million clicks every
day so far this year, amid the boom in the Chinese mainland's stock
market. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has more than
doubled this year.
(Shanghai Daily November 9, 2007)