The Chinese search engine Baidu confidently beat its competitors. Today it takes 1st place in China, 8th place in North Korea, 10th in Hong Kong, 15th in Japan, 27th in Taiwan and 82nd in the USA. The Baidu search engine has the same popularity in China as Google in Europe.
Google rival from the Middle Kingdom
Baidu is considered one of the largest Internet companies in the world. It was founded in January 2000 by former students Eric Sue and Robin Lee, who graduated in America. They managed to attract about $ 12 million of investments. Their goal was to create a domestic Internet company that could compete with American "monsters" such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The name is literally translated "a hundred times," "a thousand times," or "countless times." It is taken from the last lines of Xin Qingzi's poem, "The Green Jade Table at the Lantern Festival." It says: "I searched hundreds of times in the crowd, suddenly turning, she, she there, in the dim light of a burning candle."
The poem talks about a man who is looking for his jade dream. According to the developers, the Chinese search engine Baidu symbolizes the constant search for the ideal. In this regard, the name of the search engine is sometimes translated as “dream search”.
Golden shield
Unofficially, the project is called the "Great Chinese Firewall" (a pun, meaning as the ancient Great Wall of China and as a network firewall). This is a virtual shield that filters Internet content in China. The development of the project lasted for 5 years. And at the end of 2003, the Golden Shield began its work.
In addition to the “shield”, China also uses DNS-blocking technology. There is a “black list” of sites, access to which is completely closed. Web pages are filtered by keywords that are indirectly or directly related to state security.
Chinese Baidu, Sogou and Soso are popular search engines not only in their homeland, but also in Europe. This is not the case with Google, Bing and Yahoo, which are rapidly losing their leading positions in China.
Achievements
How popular is baidu.com? Every day about 50 thousand Internet users visit it. It is among the top 10 most popular and profitable Internet sites, second only to giants such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Wikipedia.
In mid-2006, China’s main search engine launched the Baiduopedia or Baidu Baike project. In the first 3 weeks, she circumvented Chinese Wikipedia and became the leader in the country. The Baidu Encyclopedia is subject to total censorship, as is the search engine itself. At the beginning of 2017, it contains about 14 million articles. In other words, Baidupedia has more information than Russian, English, Chinese and German Wikipedia combined.
According to the indicator of the global ranking of sites (Alexa Traffic Rank), baidu.com takes the 4th position in the world. The site index contains more than 90 million graphic files, 800 million web pages and more than 12 million media content files.
In 2013, Baidu together with the German company Avira released its own anti-virus program Baidu Antivirus.
Company President Zhang Yatsin in 2016 announced his ambitious plan. After 5 years, he intends to begin mass production of cars (self-driving).
Competitors
Baidu undoubtedly leads the market in the Middle Kingdom. According to experts, from 65% to 85% of the population of China use it. But despite such popularity, this “giant” has competitors: So.com, Sogou.com and Soso.com. These Chinese Internet search engines are fighting for customers and dream of breaking out in the lead.
The So.com search engine appeared 12 years after Baidu, and now it owns 17% of the market. It is owned by Qihoo 360, their software is mainly aimed at owners of “pirated” or illegal copies of Windows in China. 360 programs bypass authentication and allow you to install OS updates.
Qihoo is actively collaborating with Nokia and Google in the field of mobile search and plans to enter European markets. Recently, the company bought the shares of its competitor Sogou, and therefore its market position may grow by 10%.
The Chinese search engine Soso.com is owned by the largest Internet provider Tencent. The company is the creator of such successful projects as WeChat and QQ messengers, owns the company Riot Games. In mobile search, it confidently takes the second place (15% of the market).
Foreign search engines in China
The Bing.com system, despite the support of Microsoft, is not popular in the Middle Kingdom. It is used by no more than 1% of the population of the country and only to search for information on English-speaking resources.
Due to total censorship, the Google.com search engine refused to work in China. In 2010, the company closed its representative office in the country and relocated to Hong Kong. Google’s share in the Chinese market has declined significantly and currently stands at 3%.
Thanks to the departure of Google, the Chinese search engine Baidu has strengthened its position in the domestic market. And with the opening of the Japanese version, she became the second search engine in the world.