Baidu.com (NASDAQ: BIDU) stock has been rising quite a bit today. So far this morning, the stock has risen up to 93.24 or 5.18%. Baidu.com is the number one search engine in China. There has been some speculation recently that either Google or Yahoo is interested in purchasing the company to gain a stonger foothold in the Chinese market. I am wondering whether this speculation is what is fuelling the stock increase. It seems kind of a delayed reaction if the reason for the increase is the third quarter earnings report where they increased profit ten fold. Their third quarter earnings was announced October 31. This is one company that people should watch for in the future as a possible acquistion target to gain market share in China.

While I was in China, I saw first hand that the search market was practically split between people searching with Google and others searching with Baidu. Another thing I noticed was people seemed to use Baidu to search for MP3s. When people were asked why they searched with one or the other they didn’t have a solid answer other than it was the one they always used. Then when asked if they would ever switch to another search engine most seemed alright with the idea as long as the searches brought them useful results.  Overall though, there remained some patriotism about using a Chinese search engine.