China bids Baidu to Google

Posted on | February 2, 2011 | No Comments

While the big search engine news is the row between Google and Microsoft’s Bing, China’s Baidu continues to become a search behemoth with financial successes exceeding expectations and a dominating market share in Chinese language search.

Sanctioned by the People’s Republic of China, Baidu’s name comes from a poem written during the Song Dynasty over 800 years ago and about searching for a beautiful woman in a chaotic crowd. Baidu, which literally means hundreds, refers to the many glances scanning the crowd before she is finally sighted. The term seems appropriate for the massive quantitative crunching of today’s search engines and especially the complex mapping of the Chinese language.

Located in Beijing and registered in the Cayman Islands, Baidu is the most successful Chinese language search engine to date, reaching 76% of the market in fourth quarter of 2010. It’s total revenues in the same quarter were estimated at $371 million, nearly double its figures from the same period a year earlier.

Some background on Baidu:

Google’s market share fell below 20% for the first time in the last quarter of 2010, due in part, to Google’s decision to reroute its traffic to its Hong Kong servers. The decision was made last year in order to avoid some self-censorship requirements imposed by mainland China.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

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