China’s Baidu launches in Egypt

China’s Baidu, the country’s largest search engine is making a push into North Africa with the launch of a new website in Egypt. The move comes after Beijing announced earlier this month that it would like to see the company become a leading international brand and compete with Google.

The new Egyptian website is a model of one of the company’s popular Chinese sites and is a question and answer service in the same mold as Baidu Knows.

Despite the push into the Egyptian market, which has seen a five-fold increase in Facebook users and an increase to nearly 30 million Internet users this year, according to the government’s stastitics agency CAPMAS, many Egyptian analysts are not convinced that move will be a success.

“We already have a lot of start-ups doing similar things and I don’t think Baidu has much of a chance to make a large push into the market right now,” said Waseem Mohamed, a former Google employee in Egypt. “This will take a lot of promotion and even then I don’t know if it will be successful.”

“Regardless if it’s domestically, or in the international environment, we will firmly support the development of Baidu,” the government said in a statement on Thursday.