Baidu is officially open in Japan

Chinese search engine Baidu, which has 74% search share in China, has officially open its service in Japan. The Japanese version of Baidu offers web search, image search, video search and blog search services.

Baidu’s CEO Robin Li said, “We are going to add the services and the functions that meet Japanese user’s needs, and would like to make Baidu Asia’s search portal site.  We are hoping that Baidu Japan will become more popular than Yahoo and Google in Japan as we are in China.”

They plan to start offering the paid placement advertising, etc. by 2010.

I’m not sure if or when Baidu will become one of the main search engines in Japan, but this definitely makes the search engine landscape in Japan very interesting in up coming months.