Chinese search engine Baidu launched their blog search service on Thursday.

Yu Jun, a Baidu senior executive, said the service was based on a database of billions of websites including all the blogs supported by Chinese blog service providers and individual blog websites.

The new service is expected to boost the number of Baidu's users. They started their space channel last July to provide blog services.

A report released by Baidu earlier this week showed the number of bloggers who use Chinese had reached 19.87 million. This is a 24-percent rise over the same period last year with 52.6 million blogs being produced.

The number of blog service providers rose almost 55 percent in the past year to 1,460. Qzone, run by Tencent, had the most bloggers and visitors. It's followed by Sina.com, MSN Spaces and Sohu.com.

Baidu, as China's largest search engine, hopes to expand its business in a growing market, say analysts.

(Xinhua News Agency December 8, 2006)