[LINK] China's google

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

It turns out China's version of Google is much
more mercantile-minded than any western engine.

NYTimes today:

www.baidu com

“The people at Yahoo didn’t think search was all that important, and so 
neither did I,” says Mr. Wu, who is now the chief technology officer at 
the Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com. “But Robin Li seemed very 
determined to stick with it. And you have to admire what he accomplished.”

Indeed. In 1999, Mr. Li founded his search company in China, naming it 
Baidu (pronounced “by-DOO”). Today, Baidu has a market value of $3 
billion and operates the fourth-most trafficked Web site in the world.

While Baidu continues to gain market share in China — and does so with a 
Web site that the Chinese government heavily censors, and that gives 
priority to advertising rather than relevant search results — some 
analysts question whether Baidu can withstand competition from Google and 
Yahoo, which possess superior technology and global work forces. <snip>

In September 2001, Baidu began its own site — Baidu.com — which looked 
almost exactly like Google’s no-frills home page. 

And even before Google did it, Baidu allowed advertisers to bid for ad 
space and then pay Baidu every time a customer clicked on an ad. 

Small and medium-size companies loved it, the site became deluged with 
traffic and Baidu turned a profit in 2004. By then, Mr. Li was pushing 
for an initial public offering in the United States, insisting it would 
be a huge branding event for a company that had come to be 
called “China’s Google.”

BAIDU went public on Aug 5th 2005, at $27 a share. Last Friday, its 
shares closed up $3.03 in regular trading, to $87.75.

At the time of the I.P.O., some critics attacked Baidu’s zealousness for 
ad revenues. They noted, for example, that a Baidu search for the 
word “cancer” turned up ads for hospitals that paid for top spots in 
results rather than returning information on cancer itself. In 
comparison, Google and Yahoo more clearly separate ads from relevant 
search results by placing them on the right side of the page.
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