American PC maker Dell has announced a partnership with China’s leading search engine Baidu to tap the country’s fast-growing mobile devices market.

Dell confirmed that the two companies were cooperating in the fields of tablet computers and mobile handsets.

Around a year and a half after Google’s departure from mainland China, American software giant Microsoft has penned a deal with China's leading Internet search engine Baidu to offer its English-language search functions to Chinese users.

Baidu, which controls more than 75 per cent of the Internet search market in China, announced yesterday that Microsoft’s Bing search engine would appear on Baidu’s Web pages by the end of 2011.

The nearly-a-decade-old search engine Baidu is not only China’s most powerful search engine – boasting a 64 percent Internet search market share in the country – but is also, surprisingly, the third-largest search engine in the world.