Baidu.com and Alibaba.com, two of China's major Internet search engines, ranked the world's 10 most popular search engines last month by comScore, an Internet research firm.

Nasdaq-listed Baidu ranked third, with 5.2 percent of worldwide searches, according to the survey of 66.2 billion search queries.

Baidu is often referred to as China's version of Google due to the Chinese-language search engine's soaring popularity and profits. It made a net profit of US$24.2 million in the third quarter of 2007.

Alibaba.com got 0.8 percent of global searches, worked its way to 10th place, its first appearance in the top ten, according to the survey.

Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com, the business-to-business unit of Alibaba Group, is one of China's fastest growing Internet companies.

Its registered members soared to 24.6 million in 2007 from 6 million in 2004. Paying members increased to 255,000 by June 2007 from 77,000 in 2004.

Google ranked first with 62.4 percent of search share, about five times more than runner-up Yahoo with 12.8 percent.

Microsoft's websites came in fourth with 2.9 percent, followed by the South Korea's NHN Corporation with 2.4 percent.

(Xinhua News Agency January 27, 2008)