Baidu Inc, China's largest search engine by market share, is taking on Tencent Holdings Ltd and Sina Corp in a scramble to gather application developers worldwide by fully opening its platform and offering a sizeable fund package.

The search engine giant said on Wednesday that its application platform offers a low entry barrier, steady revenue and copyright protection for various developers, whether they are companies or individuals.

Baidu is setting aside hundreds of millions of yuan in an "Application Growth Fund" to reward developers on the basis of their application's daily usage.

Wang Mengqiu, vice-president of Baidu Inc, said the company will welcome all kinds of applications, including those related to games, music and online reading.

"Baidu responds to a huge number of search requests every day. Application developers can easily find their targeted clients because Baidu will guide users to their applications," Wang said.

Baidu unveiled its platform in September, allowing users to run applications through its website - the world's first application platform run by a search-engine company.

It moved faster than Google Inc, which in mid-2010 had expressed its intention to open the Chrome Web Store, a browser-based application service for PC users, which was officially launched in December.

Baidu's platform is now cooperating with 23,000 development partners and has received more than 30,000 applications.

It has 42 million daily users and in the past six months has had a total application user base of 3.2 billion, the company said.

But Baidu faces fierce competition from domestic Internet companies such as Tencent and Sina.

Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, also opened its platform to developers in the fourth quarter of last year.

It has received 36,000 applications and cooperated with more than 60,000 websites in the first six months, China Business News reported.

Pony Ma, founder and chairman of the Hong Kong-listed Tencent, said in November that his company wanted to open its instant messaging service QQ to developers and small- and medium-sized websites.

"Different platforms offer different values to developers. For example, Tencent has advantages in social networking because of its QQ service. Alibaba can provide developers with e-commerce buyers. However, Baidu brings enormous traffic," said Hong Bo, a partner in the Beijing-based consulting firm 5G Co.

Baidu acquired a dominant 75.8 percent market share in China's Internet search market in the first quarter, according to the Beijing-based research firm, Analysys International.

Google Inc took 19.2 percent in that period, after experiencing a continuous drop since it scaled back its operations in China last year.

Robin Li, founder and chief executive officer of Baidu Inc, has become the richest businessman on the Chinese mainland, with $9.4 billion in personal assets, according to a Forbes China list of Chinese billionaires worldwide released Tuesday.