Media Asia have an interesting article about Baidu, China’s largest Search Engine, making Mobile Search a ‘strategic focus’ for the future. I think that sounds about right, Baido needs to launch some innovative mobile apps quickly to maintain it’s head-on battle with Google on the Chinese Search front.

“There are 150 million WAP users in China so it’s approaching critical mass in terms of mobile internet for the moment, and now is the time when mobile players can start monetising this,” Bensaid said. “Mobile internet used to very much be entertainment-driven, whether it was accessing news, MP3s or pictures, but now it’s a more generic tool for search because mobile can be extremely local.” (Media Asia)

In Japan where Yahoo has the largest market share, Google has used the Mobile channel as a backdoor to gaining some market share, and it looks like the same is happening in China… especially with the recent news of Android phones being launched there soon (eg. Dell).

Baidu will certainly need to move quickly, but I don’t think creating a user-friendly Search function, is going to be enough. To compete with Google it will really need to develop an ecosystem around it’s API and encourage 3rd party developers to use it’s Search API and functionality in as many apps as possible. It’ll be interesting to see how this space develops.