It’s a tale of two Baidus - and an excellent attempt at domain name profiteering. Baidu Europe, a five-year-old, eight-person Dutch internet consultancy, wants to sell both the trademark and its baidu.eu, baidu.tv, baidu.nl and baidu.be names, and is clearly hoping the big Chinese search engine will snap them up.

The outfit says it started trading before it knew about the Asian portal, which actually launched in 2000. It’s certainly a coincidence that, in its native Holland, “Baidu” means “near you”, and very fortunate that the Beijing company launched “Baidu TV” last year.

Its come-and-get-me announcement suggests it bent over backwards to avoid confusion by launching its own Baidu search site to go up against Google (NSDQ: GOOG), but “competing against a superpower such as Google proved unsuccessful”. So it’s offloading the name and plans to adopt a new moniker.

Baidu Europe’s trademark representative tells Forbes the upstart hopes for first bids of €1.2 million (£977,000): “We are not planning to approach the Asian Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU). We expect it to come to us.”