Erictric

You may have heard of Baidu.com before. It’s essentially China’s equivalent to Google. The website currently takes position 9 on the most popular sites in the world (according to Alexa charts), and ranks in unsurprisingly at the number one position in China.

But the search engine is certainly looking to expand into the hands of more users — literally. Baidu has wrapped up deals with top handset manufacturers in China to pre-install the application on mobile devices. No word on when we’ll be seeing finalized versions of the app in the hands of consumers.

The application is currently in beta, and is the “most important product in Baidu’s mobile strategy,” said a Baidu representative in an e-mail Friday night to PC World.

More on this as we get it.