Baidu.com, China’s leading search engine, has always been more commercial than Google was. It’s common knowledge that its results are often not as good as those from Google’s algorithms. But because its entertainment results were ‘different’ (=easier to find illegal material) and most Chinese searches are related to entertainment, it still managed to keep a big lead over Google.
One big difference between Baidu and Google is how the paid results are mixed with organic search results. Both sites insert paid results, but Google gives them a yellow background so that it’s clear that they are different from the normal search results. Baidu does not do that, they look exactly the same as normal results, except for the characters ???tui guang) after the ad. Normal results have ???? (Baidu kuai zhao). Of course the average Chinese netizen probably does not know this.
This is nothing new, they have done this for a long time already. But what changed over the past few weeks, is that they now don’t sell 2 or 3 paid positions, but for some keywords up to 10 positions! For example, if you do a search for the Chinese word for game (??), the first 10 results are all paid results. If you look at the screen shot for the search I did, you only see paid results, both on the left and right side. Not one organic result pops up on the main page. I was looking at the search engine results for some of game.com.cn’s key words, and for many of them we are totally wiped away from one of the top positions to one below the fold (=you don’t see us on your screen without scrolling down). Of course this has quite some impact on traffic, but it’s the same for the competition and I assume it will be temporary because I don’t think Baidu can do this for a long time.
I think that Baidu is able to do this only because it’s a quasi-monopolist now. With Google gone to Hong Kong they suddenly have the whole search engine market for themselves. If you are annoyed by their search results you don’t have a good alternative. If you go to the redirected google.cn now, you only get Hong Kong results, meaning that most of the results are irrelevant for mainland Chinese users. I don’t understand that Google did not think about this and would instead give results based on IP address (mainland China users get Chinese results, Hong Kong users get Hong Kong results). Now they will lose even more traffic from China.
I assume that soon Google’s position will be taken over by one of the local players (Sohu’s search engine Sogou is working hard on this) or by another foreign company (Bing could have a good chance, if the government is still willing to support a foreign player). I look forward to a bit more competition in this space, the quicker the better.
Great point — hadn’t considered that fact about the actual *type* of search results that would come back — but I thought HK’s results would now come up in Simplified Chinese? Wouldn’t that also entail that the results have been blended to include Mainland Chinese results as well, or do I have that completely wrong?
Hello, so you may consider paying baidu to appear in the first search results. However natural search appears below all paid results by scrooling down as any other search webs, number of paid results appear according keywords, some with 10 results some other with one or 2. On google you can chose which web you want to see and possible to select only mainland webs.
according to Alex statistics, it looks like that most g.cn users switched to g.hk and baidu remained the same (http://tinyurl.com/yj5h6du)
this is consistent with my assumptions (actually my experiences as well)-google users demographics are dramatically different from baidu’s and two groups of users don’t switch with each other
early this year, baidu launched a reform which planed to distinguish the paid ads from natural search results by putting them to the right side or with a yellow background. but for some unknown reasons, they didn’t complete the “reform”
i agree with you that without competition or more strict regulations, baidu won’t have too much incentives to change.
advertisers are in real dilemma because you jeopardize the firm by putting all your budget into baidu, but it’s also dangerous now to advertise in g.hk, since it might be blocked anytime the mainland government want
Just a little surprised to read that Chinese searches are mostly about entertainment. I wonder if this is the result in an age difference in active Internet use between China and other countries?
I think it’s partly related to the fact that most users are still much younger than in the rest of the world. The other reason is that in many parts of China there are not many other entertainment options, so people flock to the Internet for that.
More and more internet users switched to google from Baidu.