Baidu Acquires Hao123.

BEIJING, Sept. 16 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- Baidu.com, Inc., the largest Chinese Internet search engine, today announced that it has acquired Hao123.com.

Founded in May 1999, Hao123.com, similar to Yahoo! Directory, is the most popular Chinese web directory in the world. According to Amazon.com's AlexaTraffic Rank service, Hao123.com traffic is ranked around No. 25 in the world. Its traffic is even higher than famous Chinese web sites such as CCTV.com, 263.net, and cn.Yahoo.com.

Alexa has also reported that the average traffic for Baidu ranks No.7 over the past three months, and it has moved up to No. 5 since July. iResearch, a famous Internet research center in China, performed a survey on the usage of Chinese search engines, with results showing 48.2% of users chose Baidu as the most popular Chinese search engine, while 29.7% picked Google.

''Baidu has been the leading Chinese Internet search engine for high-end users,'' said Robin Li, CEO of Baidu. ''The acquisition of Hao123.com will enable Baidu to also be dominant choice for those who are used to browsing rather than searching the web.''

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