Chinese search engine Baidu.com launched its news service last night on self-produced contents to increase its traffic rather than just diverting Web users to other news sites.

The news service - its launch comes almost one year after it was granted the license to do news - presently covers only finance in eight areas including stocks, funds and personal financing management. It can be accessed at stock.baidu.com, fund.baidu.com and money.baidu.com.

"Seen from this year's statistics (of searched key words), Web users greatly need financial information, which prompts us to launch the service," said Baidu in a statement.

Searches for financial information on Baidu, China's most popular search engine, have seen more than 100 million clicks every day so far this year, amid the boom in the Chinese mainland's stock market. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has more than doubled this year.

(Shanghai Daily November 9, 2007)