Google To Buy It's Way Into China?

SiliconBeat: Google negotiating marriage with Baidu?
In a recent entry I joked that China could take Maytag and Unocal just as long as they left us Google (NASD: GOOG).  Well, it seems that Google may do us one better, and buy Baidu.com, the leading Chinese search engine.  Apparently Google can do battle with Microsoft and Yahoo, but can't seem to crack the world's largest country.  SiliconBeat is on the story:

Interesting story here, which says the Baidu, the Chinese search engine company that is on the verge of filing for its IPO, "appears to be drawing a close look from Google."

As we noted, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in Beijing last week meeting with Baidu officials, and we've mentioned the difficulties Google has had with China.

In fact, we first figured something might be up last week when we bumped into an private investor in Baidu. The conversation was on background. We told him that we'd been trying for sometime to talk with Baidu about its track record in China and why it has reportedly done so well against Google, but that CEO Robin Li hadn't responded to our requests, even though it wasn't in a quiet period. The investor said Li was "dealing with a lot of stuff right now." Then we emailed Baidu investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and a spokesperson at first told us Baidu was in a quiet period. Huh? That is strange, we responded, because the IPO registration hadn't been filed yet. We got silence. Could the spokesperson have slipped, and mistakenly alerted us to the fact that Baidu was in a quiet period while negotiating with Google?