Baidu: Search Engine empire

BAT: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are the most important internet giants that penetrate people’s daily life. They represent the majority online eco-system in China, which covers search engine, e-commerce and social network. Learning BAT is the first step to understand the online marketing in China. Today, Seeniun Media gives you a sneak peek on Baidu – The search engine that takes over Google.

Who is Baidu?
Founded in 2000, Baidu initially provided search services to gateway websites. It benefited from the censorship and blockage over Google site and quickly won over the users. Introducing the independent search engine page www.baidu.com was its first milestone. Later, building the community around the certain topic, i.e. designing the Baidu Tieba product, was the second milestone. 
Baidu encountered up-and-downs throughout the years, tried but failed to enter e-commerce, online payment and even food delivery. AI might be their chance. Who knows?

Baidu Search Engine
When opening Baidu Search Engine, you can see the almost  interface looks almost the same as Google: a dominant search bar in the middle, then news, image, video, map and scholar on the top right corner. Google inspired Baidu, and then Baidu quickly surpassed Google after the Great Fire Wall had been imposed on Google in 2002. 
The biggest revenue of Google and Baidu are the same: ads on the search result page. Nevertheless, the biggest difference between these two giants is deeply rooted in the foundation. Baidu focuses on the commercial side, i.e. the higher the bid the better the rank, and little visual distinction between paid ads and organic search result. Google aims at a better user experience; therefore, content quality is as important as the bidding price. 

Baidu Adwords
Baidu Adwords, to large extent, was the copy of Google Penguin algorism: Bid on the keywords and its long tail keywords, optimize the on-page and off-page structure to become more crawlable.
The biggest difference between Baidu Ads and Google Ads lies in Google has been improved over the years to provide as unbiased search result as possible. Google Quality Score is designed for a balance between content quality and bidding price. However, Baidu had been labeled with some bad reputations over the years by pushing misleading but highly profitable health care services ads.  

The special Baidu algorism also enables the brand reputation management. It is possible to optimize the positive or neutral content and push the negative content down the rank over six to twelve months. 

Contact us to learn more about Baidu Ads, Online Brand Reputation, SEO and SEM services. 

Other than the search engine and Baidu Adwords, Baidu has developed a wide range of products to support and built the 360 online experiences. The key products include Baidu Map, one of the top navigation maps in China, Baidu Zhidao, an online Q&A platform that is close to Quora, Baidu Tieba, the online community where people gather for the same interest, Baidu Baike, the Chinese version of Wikipedia, Baidu Cloud, the file hosting service similar to Google Drive or Dropbox. 

We also see Baidu’s struggles in e-commerce. Many functions were developed to compete with big players but soon died down in spite of the traffic volume. When AI becomes the next hottest topic, can Baidu break its bottleneck?  ​