Baidu claims that it has solved the long-standing problem of how to search for files online.

But it seems to have fogotten that Google and Microsoft have solved this problem already, in multiple languages, and have been promoting the service for at least a year.

Yesterday Baidu launched its "multi-text search", through which not only articles and pictures can be found, but also multiple-format files including essays, business plans and market research reports can be located through Baidu's search engine.

The company says this service will enable users to get as many as 3 million Chinese-language files in such formats as doc, pdf, xls, ppt, and rtf.