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China's top search engine Baidu launches blog search service on Thursday to aid bloggers in their navigation.

Baidu, China's most popular search engine, unveiled their new blog search service as the number of Chinese bloggers reaches almost 20 million.

Created in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, Baidu's mission is, "to provide the best way for people to find information online, including Chinese language web pages, news, images and multimedia files though links provided on our website. In addition to serving individual Internet search users, we also provide an effective platform for businesses to reach potential customers online."

Baidu is the fourth most viewed search engine in the entire world, holding over 60 percent of the Chinese market. China currently has a population of 1.3 billion, of which there are 130 million Internet users, and are second in the online market only to America.

People's Daily Online says Baidu reported last week that the number of Chinese bloggers has grown to 19.87 million, which is a 24 percent rise over last year's 16 million blog writers. In a response to the tremendous jump in the number of blog posts, the top search site created the first Chinese service specifically for blogs.

Senior executive of Baidu Yu Jun said the service is based on a "database of billions of websites, including all the blogs supported by Chinese blog service providers and individual blog websites."

A study conducted by Baidu also concluded that there will be an estimated 100 million Chinese bloggers by the end of 2007, which was another major incentive for the site to create their own blog search service as the number of blog posts increases.

Members of the blogging community agree with Baidu's decision to create a blog search service to aid site users in the navigation of the growing number of posts. Blogger David Temple says, that the service is a, "Good idea since blogging is exploding around the world and China is no exception. I think the popularity of blogging in China is because it gives people a place to express their ideas more freely although not with total freedom."

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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.