Pandia takes a look at Non-American search engines and sums up the main stories of the week.

Have you heard about the Baidu search engine? If you are one of our American or European readers, probably not, but if you live in China, definitely.

This week Baidu launched its Japanese version. Or, more correctly, it relaunched its Nippon version. Baidu has had a Japanese site since March last year.

“Japan is one of the world’s most connected societies, and we have already seen positive reception from local users using our beta website,” says Masuda Jun, Vice President of Baidu’s Japanese subsidiary.

“Following the formal launch of our Japan site, we expect to see even greater user reception to the four different Japanese language services we will offer, including web search, image search, video search and blog search services.”

In China Baidu controls 60 percent of the market, twice as much as Google.

Accoding to Comscore Baidu was the third largest worldwide search property in December, behind Google and Yahoo!, but in front of Microsoft and Ask.

Russian Yandex has now also gotten a place in Comscore’s top 10. Admittedly it is the second to last position, but still, it proves that global search is more than Google, Yahoo!, Live and Ask.

At number five we find Korea’s NHN Corporation with their search engine Naver.

The big American search engine companies are doing their best to hold on to — and expand — their global territories. For instance: Today it was announced that Google is planning to establish a Malaysian office. In Asia, Google has offices in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

Pandia this week

The history of Fast Search & Transfer
The “Google generation” and emerging web behavior

Search engine headlines from around the Web

Amazon to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Digital Store
Amazon’s digital music store boasts of around 3.3 million songs from the four major U.S. music labels as well as around 33,000 independent labels. (SE Journal Jan 27 2008)

Audiobaba - Yet Another Audio Search Engine
Audiobaba searches for music by fingerprinting the acoustic and impossible to articulate qualities of every song in its database and searches through them acoustically. (AltSearchEngines Jan 25 2008)

You say you’ve never considered the politics of search engines?
Wikia’s business is based around the commercial exploitation of, politely, “community”, and less politely, the unpaid labour of digital sharecroppers. (Guardian Jan 24 2008)

Yahoo! Dumps Brand Universes
Dubbed “Brand Universes,” the sites were intended to tap into the allure of hot brands—notably those in technology and entertainment—by creating one-stop shops featuring user-created videos, bookmarks, photos and reviews. (Brandweek Jan 25 2008)

Search Engines that are Pretty in Pink (I Think)
Girly search engines (AltSearchEngines Jan 24 2008)

Politically Tinged Promotion For Live Search
he site is called Left vs. Right and (probably) takes its inspiration from the old Saturday Night Live skit point/counter point (SE Land jan 24 2008)

You Pick The Pic For Ask.Com Homepage!
The new feature lets you upload any image of your choice, a family snap or your company logo perhaps. (PageTraffic Jan 24 2008)

Former Google Executive hired by Ask.com!
Cesar Mascaraque has been hired by Ask.com as its new European managing director (PageTraffic Jan 25 2008)

Google Health
The promised Google Health resource is slowly arriving - there’s a login screen but nothing behind it at the moment that we can get to. (Phil Bradley Jan 24 2008)

Ask.com hits back against AskEraser critics, with a little help from a friend
Is AskEraser living up to its promise of deleting the search histories of Web users? (CW Jan 24 2008)