Baidu knows every child in China: The website with the panda bear's paw is the Far Eastern counterpart to the Google search engine used in this country and offers numerous online services.
Along with Tencent and Alibaba, Baidu is one of the three largest Internet companies in China.
Started as a successful search engine, the company of founder Robin Li is now also very active in artificial intelligence and autonomous driving.
The search engine Baidu is among the top three most viewed websites in the world.
Like its western counterpart Google, Baidu offers numerous other services such as maps, Internet communities and cloud computing in addition to the actual search function.
Baidu: founding and beginnings
The Chinese software specialist Robin Li is considered to be the inventor of the search engine Baidu. After studying in Beijing, Li moved to the USA in 1991, where he obtained a master's degree in computer science from the University of Buffalo. He then worked for IDD Information Services in New Jersey, among other things on better algorithms for search engines. During his work, Li developed the Rankdex algorithm there, which for the first time also evaluated the popularity of a website based on the number of hyperlinks. He later switched to the Infoseek search engine in California.
In 1999, Li finally returned to his native China.
According to Li, despite the Chinese censorship, Li preferred Beijing as the headquarters for his newly founded company, fearing that the Chinese government would consider him a traitor if he opted for Hong Kong.
Baidu: The search for happiness
The name Baidu literally means "a hundred times" or "countless times" and comes from the poem "Green Jade Table at the Festival of Lights" by Xin Qiji, which was written over 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty: "I have hundreds of times in the Crowd wanted / Suddenly I turned around and there he was in the candlelight. "
Baidu: The Story of a Rapid Ascent
Robin Li first developed Baidu as a search engine for existing large websites such as Sina and Sohu before making them accessible to the mass market with his business partner Eric Xu. To this end, he was able to raise $ 25 million from investors. Li re-developed functions that were shortly afterwards taken over by Google for the western market. He invented the pay-per-click model, in which advertisers only pay a fee when internet surfers click on an ad.
Within three years, Baidu was profitable.
His investors tried to persuade Li to sell the search engine to one of the big American companies like Google or Microsoft, but he had other plans.
He took Baidu himself on the New York technology exchange Nasdaq, where the stock jumped from $ 27 to $ 122 immediately after launch.
Direct competitor Google bought 750,000 shares valued at $ 5 million - and sold them two years later for a whopping 59.5 million.
Baidu: market leader in China
Baidu grew rapidly in its home market and now has a market share of around 75 percent in search engines in China.
Google never really got a foothold in China and left the market because it refused to meet government censorship requirements.
In addition to China, Baidu was able to build up additional pillars in other countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand.
A special feature of the search engine is the ability to search specifically for mp3 music files.
The easiest way to do this is to use its own Baidu500 list, which has become one of the most important music charts in China.
Other important functions of Baidu at a glance:
Baidu WangPan: Cloud storage service with 2 TB of free storage space for every user
Baidu Baike: Encyclopedia comparable to Wikipedia with over 16 million entries
Baidu Maps: Map service comparable to Google Maps
Baidu News: Online news portal
Baidu Tieba: Online community with countless forums for exchange, roughly comparable to Reddit
Baidu Movies: Online portal where Chinese films and series can be accessed free of charge
Baidu Translate: translation tool with over 200 different languages
Baidu Tushu: Search engine for books, but only links to external websites where books can be read
There is also a whole range of functions for business and commercial users, including anti-virus software and Baidu wireless for cell phones.
Baidu: Features for webmasters and SEO experts
Many German companies are eyeing the Chinese market with its 1.4 billion consumers.
It is possible for them to use the Baidu search engine analogously to SEO marketing on Google.
Knowledge of Chinese is very important.
The content should be written in "Simplified Chinese" characters.
In general, the same rules of the game apply as for Google:
high quality unique content, the more the better
As many good backlinks as possible (only from other sites with the Chinese ending .cn)
responsive design
simple, clear data structure
In addition, the Chinese censorship must always be kept in mind when creating the website.
If censored terms appear, the page is not even displayed in China - and therefore not found by Baiduspider, the Baidu crawler.
In order for the search to work, your website must have a Chinese domain extension such as .cn or .com.cn.
Foreign websites are not even noticed by Baidu.
Baidu: The further development
For a few years now, Baidu has been relying heavily on new lines of business to get rid of the search engine dependency.
The main new areas are the following:
iQiyi
iQiyi is an online streaming portal that Baidu launched in 2010 together with Providence Equity Partners.
iQiyi acts as a co-product of international film productions and produces its own content for the portal.
In 2017, iQiyi and Netflix signed an agreement that allows iQiyi to stream Netflix productions in China.
The portal currently has around 80 million paying subscribers.
The record holder is the South Korean series "My Love From the Star", which was viewed a total of 14.5 billion times while it was broadcast in China.
DuerOS: Artificial Intelligence
Baidu has developed its own AI system under the name DuerOS and holds over 7,000 patents in the field of artificial intelligence in China.
DuerOS forms the basis for new smart home systems with voice control and can be integrated into numerous electronic devices.
The biggest success are the Xiaodu smart speakers, which are in second place globally behind Amazon.
The number of DuerOS users doubled from January 2019 to July 2019 from 200 million to 400 million.
The system records 4.2 billion questions every month.
Apolong: self-driving cars
Another growth market for Baidu is connected, driverless cars.
A total of 40 companies have come together under the project name Apolong or Baidu Apollo, including Ford, Toyota and Intel.
Since 2018, Baidu has been producing minibuses with the manufacturer King Long, which will initially run driverless in Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan.
Expansion to Japan is already planned.
Baidu has also entered into other partnerships with Chinese companies to develop driverless cars and is very active in this segment.
Baidu: Criticism of the censorship in China
As early as 2009, a whistleblower in the company announced that Baidu was heavily censoring its search engine. Many websites are not showing up in China and there are no search results on certain topics. However, Baidu does not differ from other Chinese Internet companies, which for better or worse come to terms with the censorship.
In fact, Baidu can also be subversive: In 2020, it became known that US journalists were able to uncover several hundred internment camps in western Xinjiang Province using the search engine and the Baidu Maps map service. It is estimated that up to a million members of the Muslim Uyghur minority are held in these prisoners. Baidu had received instructions from the Chinese government to hide the bearings on the online cards. However, the hiding of the camps turned out to be so deliberately amateurish that it caught the journalists' eye even more.
