Baidu, The Uncontested Leader Of Contested Practices
With its 65.8% market share, Baidu is the uncontested leading search engine in China. Its main competitor in this huge market, Google, lies far behind with only 22% of the market share, followed by Sogou which, with only 2.9%, still outshines Yahoo! (Source: China IntelliConsulting Corporation).
Like Google, Baidu is subject to the Chinese regime’s censorship. This includes indexing censorship, or rather the non-indexing of certain websites, and the filtering of certain search requests of a political or sexual nature. If you search for “Tiananmen,” for example, you’ll get very different search results on Google and Baidu.
Last week, however, Baidu was associated with an entirely different kind of censorship. The search engine has been accused of receiving payment for concealing the contaminated milk scandal. In a letter later published on the internet, the PR agency of dairy company Sanlu advised the company to pay Baidu 3 million Yuan to delete all negative information about the brand from its search engine. In the same letter, the agency stated that two other producers incriminated in this contaminated milk scandal (Yili and Mengniu) had already bought Baidu’s “selective memory” for 5 million Yuan.
Baidu has not denied being contacted by the three companies in question, but insists it never accepted such a deal. Sanlu also states that it was indeed advised by its agency to offer the aforementioned deal to Baidu, but that it did not follow its advice.
Today it’s hard to tell if that’s true. One thing is clear, however: Baidu’s image has suffered because of this scandal. In the forums on the Tianya website, web users have discussed this issue and compared search results for identical searches on Google and Baidu. One Chinese web user claims, for example, that his search for “Sanlu kidney stones” led to 18,000 results on Google, and only 2 on Baidu.
Tianya has conducted a survey on its site. 57% of the 4,100 polled users said that they would not use Baidu again. Even if this percentage is not representative, as the number of Chinese web users was estimated at 210 million in 2007, this scandal has, at any rate, been really bad publicity for Baidu.
Sources:
• Wikipedia – Censure de l’Internet en chine
• Le Monde
• Baidu
Tags: baidu, china, google, Search engine
