Earlier today I heard mention of the growing web sector in china and about many companies that are battling it out to gain market share. Baidu.com was among them and apparently it is a hugely popular website, ranking 4th in alexa. The CEO (if I recall correctly) said that they plan to battle google directly to compete. Now correct me if I'm wrong but, isn't google banned in china, or was it just "highly regulated"? If the latter is true, then I believe Baidu has NO chance. The results are highly irrelevant and not useful. I started this thread for construction discussion and not to simply bash one search engine or the other. Looking forward to your thoughts and replies.
Google was banned from China. However, Google China since this year because they applied filter to screen out anything the government doesn't allow www.google.cn http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm
Baidu has won the China Search Engine Game a long time ago. Guge.com is Google's weapon to fight back the China market. However, Google loses again, ouch!
It will be interesting to see some stats on the searches done on both in a month. I lived in China for nearly a year and almost no one I met or saw in all the internet cafes over the country every used Google they all used Baidu. Google works fine there but they filter out some stuff. Also very few people use chat services like those offered by Yahoo, Google or Microsoft. They all use a client called QQ. Which I might add has had some features in it years before MSN got to add them. If there is a some Chinese people on this forum it would be interesting to see what they have to say about this and if they have started to notice that people are actually using google.
Im not sure if that was sarcasm [because it doesnt translate well on the net]. But China is far from a free country, its run by a dictatorship government and if you step out of favour you'll go to prison or disappear. The government censors almost everything from newspapers to the internet and they will crush any opposition in one swoop. Google wanted to crack the chinese market so they gave into the governments demands to censor content, so much for G's "Do no evil" slogan, eh?
Google is not banned in China except for short periods of minutes up to hours and in worst case a day before it's back. I don't know why they have these "micro bans". It can go weeks without problem. Google is however regulated in China and besides political things it's often "harmless things" that's censored. Wikipedia didn't work for a long time but is actually working since a few weeks ago. I have experienced photos of my mothers dog placed on a private homepage was censored . They won't show up inside China but works fine outside China (i'm not talking Google now, just normal browsing). I think the dog is very cute and definitely not so ugly it should be censored !!!! Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. I can't comment how well indexed Chinese pages are in Baidu because i don't speak Chinese but international sites are poorly indexed in Baidu. Relevancy is very poor for non Chinese searches (and probably for Chinese searches as well). I think Baidu is high on Alexa simply because it's 1.3 billion people living in China. And that's where the upper limit is for Baidu, Baidu will never appeal for an international market unless it index international pages better and provide more relevant results.
I agree, one of the reasons behind baidu's success is it allowed people to very easily search for illegal movies and mp3s and watch/listen/download them. Baidu allow people to purchase the top rankings on their search engine which means with more and more people coming into the market that the relevevancy is totally screwed. Yeah a lot of people use QQ here, but just about everybody uses MSN too. Of course nobody uses AIM (which is incredibly slow here). I think QQ might be a rip off of ICQ from years ago (just guessing). One problem the chinese filter has is it blocks IPs, so lets say one blog on blogspot says things that gets it blocked.. Then all of blogspot is banned, no matter the subdomain. China is supposed to have around 100 million internet users, thats only going to grow. How many does the USA have? BTW china's top 3 search engines are: baidu, google, and sina anyhow i'm just randomly saying stuff now.. time to go grab some happy at happy hour.
Baidu is a more Chinese-oriented search engine, while Google is a more English-popular search engine. In China, so far it is difficult for google to compete with Baidu though Baidu copied Google's idea and its search engine techniques are more crappy than Google's.
Hi, I am from China, baidu.com is more popular in China as google had been banned for several months in 2001-2002 then baidu got the search market in China. Why google was banned, people said that was polical problems. But I usually use google instead of baidu, I use google mail, toolbar, analytics,etc. Why people here use QQ as many people can't read English in 1999 when QQ.com was born, so they got the IM market in China. But people now use MSN for familiar and qq for stranger.
The economy has nothing to do with censorship of information. China restricts the flow of information (media) to the extreme.
Yeah newspapers here suck, luckily I don't have any restriction on the internet (that I know of). China has a huge potential for growth, really it is a true capitalist country.
yeah, baidu is sooo popular here. all my friends use it for everything. the owner wants it to get bigger than google, like the owner of taobao.com wants that to get bigger than ebay. but in reality, its just going to stay in china and the far east really.
how big is google internationally? I mean as far as internet users go china is about the same as america right now, but its growing exponentially.
i feel headache looking at those chinese site...They all look like craigslist with tons of Ads everywhere
no no no no, if you think about it, for every city's population (eg, qingdao is 2 million) there is a population of nearly double that size living in the surrounding farmland. and thats not even thinking about the places away from major cities. there is a much small internet usage than america here. sorry if that didn't make sense, it worked in my head