Britain and China have announced plans for a significant boost in trade levels between the two countries.

Speaking to reporters after talks in Beijing, UK prime minister Gordon Brown revealed that he and Chinese premier Wen Jiabo have jointly agreed a target of a 50% rise in trade by 2010.

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Techcrunch reported yesterday that traffic was being redirected from Google to Chinese search engine Baidu.

There is speculation that the move, which also affected MSN and Yahoo, was carried out by the Chinese government in response to the United States awarding of a Congressional Medal of Honor to the Dalai Lama on Wednesday.

However, today there was some confusion over whether the redirect had actually happened - blocks and redirects are never commented on by the Chinese goverment - and several reports, notably from Infoworld suggested that the redirect story had been fabricated.

We can confirm that the redirect really did take place - at least for a while.

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According to a BBC News article out today, Google powered 37 billion of 61 billion searches in August - over half of ALL global search requests.

Unless you’ve been otherwise engaged for the better part of the last decade, Google’s dominance of search will come as no surprise to you. What might come as a surprise to some will be to see that a company called Baidu accounted for an impressive 52% more search requests than the $500+ billion Microsoft Corporation and its related search engines (MSN / Live Search).

Here’s the list of August’s Top 5 most popular search engines worldwide:
(as per comScore)

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