The move could represent a significant drop in traffic for Baidu, which is currently the largest search engine in China in terms of market share and Google’s primary competition within the country.

According to some report, Maxthon could account for as much as 25% of Baidu’s overall traffic.

If that’s the case, then the purchase will represent a huge shot in the arm for Google, who no doubt will demand that it be incorporated as the default search engine for the browser.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington breaks down the deal:

At the very least we expect the strategic deal to involve replacing the default search option in the browser from the Baidu search engine in China and Yahoo in other countries with Google search. The deal may also go beyond search and involve integration with other Google services directly into the browser. Maxthon would then be promoted on Google as a preferred browser.

Maxthon is based off of the IE rendering engine, which could create some potential conflict in light of Google’s past contributions to the Firefox browser.

Is the company looking to form a new alliance with IE-based browsers, or are they just looking to dip into as many cookie jars as possible?

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley ponders the question:

Given Google’s close partnership with Mozilla, would a Google-backed Maxthon dump the IE engine in favor of Gecko, the rendering engine at the heart of Mozilla? Or would Google be more likely to push for Maxthon to remain IE-based, giving Google a stronger foothold in the IE browser marketplace?

There seem to be more questions than answers on the heels of this announcement. Google has made no official statement concerning the acquisition as of yet, so it will be interesting to see if the company unveils any of its initial plans for the browser at that time. 

My pictures don’t do justice, but everything between me and the Hilton in this shot (I’d guess more than a mile away) is CES buildings.

Whenever I found something I thought was interesting or that I wanted to remember, I snapped a picture of it.

XM was one of the first things I saw. They had a new portable player that I wanted to remember to go back to see tomorrow.

Samsung had a wall of “plasma porn.”

My first shot of Microsoft’s booth. Wall to wall people. Everytime I went in there. Who cares about Microsoft? Oh, no one.

HD-DVD booth was packed. Why? Their first players are a LOT lower price than Blue-Ray. I’ll check out both players more later this week. The quality is stunning. I see one of these in my future.

New Motion Tablet PC is small! I think I’m gonna get one of these to make Patrick jealous.

Maxthon was showing off a new plugin that lets you blog with WordPress. Oh, oh, that’s cool! Maxthon is a cool IE-based browser (it’s Chris Pirillo’s favorite browser, and i can see why). They gave me a beta, will have to try that. If you go by, ask them for a memory key. They have a bunch under the booth with Maxthon loaded on a 256mb key. That’s cool.

The car bling-bling was out in force. At least 100 really killer cars with entertainment systems inside. Here’s Buzz standing in front of a bling-bling machine.

102″ plasma is sweet. But, at $150,000 (or more, they wouldn’t give us an exact price) this is a toy for only the Gates’ or Jobs’ to play with.

So far the winner in my decision of an HDTV screen is the Samsung HP-S5073. Comes out in June. Has noticeably better blacks than any plasma I saw at the show (they were showing it next to one of their existing models and the difference was dramatic). 50-inch. About $4,500.

But I’m saving the coolest for last. The OQO Tablet PC. That drew a sizeable crowd everytime he OQO folks stopped. This thing is tiny. Here’s a picture next to a cell phone so you can see it. I played around with it and I have serious drool factor. Vic Gundotra would kill me if I got one before him. $2,100. Available in four weeks, but orderable now.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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