Bing has officially staked out its online search territory in the Chinese market by striking an agreement with Hudong, which is regarded as the Wikipedia of China. The new partnership looks to give Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, a greater reach throughout China by generating search results that are more local and relevant to Chinese Bingers since those results will be pulling information from Hudong.
You know how when you search for something in English on either Bing or Google, you almost always have a Wikipedia link at the top of your results or at least among the top few results? Chinese internet searchers could expect to start having likewise results with Hudong links appearing pretty high in their search, except much more extensively than Wikipedia’s prominence in English search. The Wikipedia English site has nearly 4 million articles, a lot by any standard yet far behind the 6.4 million articles available on Hudong. More, Hudong has on average nearly twice the amount of words per article than Wikipedia, 1097 words to 590 words, respectively.
Hudong, which aside from being the world’s largest Chinese encyclopedia is also a for-profit site, expects that its new collaboration with Bing will accelerate the efficiency of both sites. Hudong CEO Pan Haidong said that the online encyclopedia still focuses on spreading knowledge and creating a college without walls with its wiki technology in the increasingly complex Internet information environment.
The new buddy cop movie of internet search between Bing and Hudong is a timely development for Bing as it continues to amp up its all-out effort of pushing Google off its well-worn throne of online search. Aside from an impressive new design that emphasizes social-sourced search results, Microsoft also announced that its basically going to turn XBox 360s into online search devices by equipping the Bing search engine with all XBox Live Gold accounts.
Bing’s team-up with Hudong should lend the search engine’s new second-column Snapshot feature some hefty momentum to go against Google’s Knowledge Graph in the Chinese market.