China’s well used search tool known as Baidu.com, happens to be doing very well. From the looks of the scene thus far, advertising sales have been very good indeed for the Chinese search engine.

SHANGHAI Baidu.com, China’s most-used search engine, said Wednesday that its first-quarter net income surged as advertising sales closed the gap on those of Sina Corp., the nation’s biggest Internet portal. Sina posted a profit drop.

Baidu’s profit rose to 35.2 million yuan, or $4.4 million, from 2.5 million yuan a year ago. Sina’s net income fell 32 percent to $7 million on costs for developing search software.

Baidu’s ad revenue tripled to about $16.5 million, while Sina’s rose 33 percent to $22 million.

Shares of Baidu rose 22 percent in U.S. after-hours trading as investors bet that the company’s focus on its search engine will help ad revenue grow faster than that of portals, which offer links to news, games and movie clips from a main Web page. Google is expanding in China as it extends its lead globally over Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN…. Source: International Herald Tribune