CCTV focuses on Google and Yahoo!

China Central Television is dispersing the flak it received, for the controversy embroiled Baidu search engine by alleging that Google and Yahoo! sport illegal medical ads on their web sites.

Baidu is the search engine of choice in the world’s most populous country, and for a sneaky little reason. The reason being that a shadowy set of constantly changing domain names provide a great service — free and unlicensed music downloads. Despite many takedown attempts, lawsuits and complaints, free music continued to be available on Baidu. Then it came under the scanner for a number of advertisements of medical supplies that were not licensed. This forced Baidu to drop these ads, and the matter would have settled there.

Continuing on its crackdown on illegal medical services being advertised through the web, state-owned CCTV launched a fresh wave of attacks against Google China and Yahoo! China for similar offences. Both the search giants have been accused of taking money for advertising medical scams.

Google China is however secretly investing in a lot of Chinese internet services. The world’s largest demographic cannot be easily ignored by the search giant. Although Google can hardly afford to offer free MP3 downloads, it is heavily investing in online Chinese-run social networking and entertainment services.