Alibaba's Taobao marketplace, supported by a search engine, allows consumers to look for products by entering keywords similar to google.com, bing.com, and others. Merchants selling products
participate in auctions of search keywords. About 7 million merchants participate in the auctions, per
The Wall Street Journal, which describes how the platform works. Taobao's ad revenue
during Q1 2014 to the end of March was about $1.24 billion -- more than half of Alibaba's $1.96 billion revenue for the quarter, per the
WSJ, citing estimates from iResearch. Aside from
Baidu, Alibaba generates the most revenue from search in China.
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