BEIJING -- Baidu Inc, China's biggest search engine, plans to increase its efforts on the mobile search service starting this year, as its market share in the mobile search area lags far behind its dominance in traditional PC search.

"In the past, we have not spent any resources in monetizing the mobile traffic, but starting from this year, we will do something to figure out how to better serve our customers on our mobile platform," Robin Li, chief executive officer, said during a conference call on Feb 17.

He said mobile will become "a very important channel to distribute our products". He expects that "mobile will represent an ever larger percentage of our total traffic" in the coming year.

Baidu's share in China's PC search has kept climbing, especially after rival Google Inc redirected all mainland search traffic to Hong Kong in 2010.

Baidu occupied 78.3 percent of PC search revenues last quarter, with Google's ranking second at 16.7 percent, according Analysys International, a Chinese research company. However, Baidu only had 33.5 percent in the mobile search sector, closely followed by Easou.com's 22 percent and Tencent Holdings Ltd's Soso.com's 21 percent in terms of traffic in the third quarter of last year, said the research company.

Baidu's revenues increased by 82.5 percent to 4.474 billion yuan ($710.9 million), and its net income climbed 77 percent to 2.05 billion yuan ($326.3 million), according to its financial report on Feb 17.