Baidu shareholders are loving Google right now

As you may know by now, Google shut down their Chinese search engine two days ago and have been sending searchers to their Hong Kong operations.

This has sent Baidu stock prices soaring to over $600, the highest it has been since its open in 2005. This is a very notable jump since a couple months ago in January 2010, it was trading at $386.5.

From speaking with a few international search engines looking for investors, the main reason they want to raise expansion capital is for foreign language SEO purposes. For someone in China, it probably makes more sense to use their local search engine, Baidu, then an American one. For one thing the characters, language and placement of words are very different, so the correct results may not automatically be populated. This is another reason why Baidu stock is doing so well. 

Venture capital advisors may be a little hesitant to put expansion capital into some early companies because these players are so dominant. Bing recently launched and is doing great however, so we are always looking for a new way to search!