Back to the future

In a real blast of the late 1990s, John Battelle points us to a Reuters story about Baidu's planned US IPO. Talk of "Internet valuations", pe multiples of 67 times and the "China factor" has us reaching for bubble and b*****t alarms:

It's a Hot Search IPO!: "Baidu, that is. Minority owned by Google, rumored to be courted by same, under the cloud of alleged copyright abuse, but still raising its range and setting hearts aflutter. More from Reuters...."

(Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)

The Reuters piece is here. The market does, however, seem to have an appetite for this type of thing as we saw with Focus Media so I daresay Baidu will do very well for the promoters.