The number 1 chinese search engine Baidu has struck a deal with HP to pre-load its search engine to all HP machines for China starting Oct 2006.

Good for Baidu, bad for Google. Google however had a similar deal with Dell. So where's yahoo and msn? They shouldn't discount China in their plans as China is the main battle ground in Asia due to the sheer number of people in that country.

While Baidu and Google are fighting for search supremacy, their PC counterparts Dell and HP are also fighting for PC supremacy.

These tie-ups are a real great strategy for these search engines which are the real beneficiary of these deals. I wonder how much they paid Dell and HP to get their search engines pre-loaded?