Taobao blocks Baidu, Google, Yahoo search engines in China

Taobao.com

Chinese online auction and e-commerce website Taobao.com has recently announced its latest consumer protection plan, which (at first appearances quite strangely) includes blocking the search engines of Baidu, Google and Yahoo.

Apparently Taobao.com completely blocked the search engine of Baidu and it also partly blocks that of Google and Yahoo.

Taobao.com says that the blocks of search engines aim to eliminate fraud caused by ill-intentioned merchants. Through different blocking degrees over different search engines, it can prevent consumers from being cheated by illegal merchants who gain consumers trust by pay per click and search optimization techniques.

Statistics offered by Taobao.com show that over 80% of consumers complaints are caused by a small number of unscrupulous businesses. Comments on blogs query the reasons for this blocking of search sites.

Taobao.com is owned by Alibaba Group in China.
Source: Yahoo