The biggest search engine in China

What’s China’s Biggest Search Engine Up To?
It's a mistake to think that Google rules the search engine world. Native Chinese search engine Baidu holds a massive majority in the Chinese search engine market. With China having now surpassed the US to become the largest internet population in the world, this is no small matter.

Baidu has a tight hold on three times the online Chinese search industry as its rival Google.
Yet it is so seldom that we hear news about this far away giant. Here, we'll look at some recent Baidu stories that have been developing.

The first was announced just one week ago – Baidu declared its plans to compile the largest digital rural encyclopedia in China. Yes, China's rural population is starting to get online in the masses, despite China's well-known strict internet controls. In fact, in Baidu's recent keyword promotion project, it was noticed that revenues were extremely high from the keyword 'agriculture', providing further evidence or rural online growth. Also showing high growth potential for Baidu were the keywords 'forestry', 'animal' and 'fishery'.

The rural encyclopedia will include 500,000 of China's administrative villages – covering over three-quarters of all China's villages. Baidu has compiled the content of this encyclopedia largely from participants of its 'rural information competition', on which it spent roughly five million yuan.

The compa
ny also plans to scale up keyword promotion and provide consultation, brand ad exhibitions, and online sales services for rural traveling and promotion of local products.

The company is perhaps attempting new tricks due to the quarter-to-quarter falls in revenue it reported in the last quarter or 2008 and first quarter of 2009, the result of reduced advertising spend.

It was predicted Baidu would suffer from bad publicity from its workers' strike in May, who were angry over salary cuts and new sales commission policies. It also received bad press earlier this year for carrying ads from unlicensed medical companies. Baidu invested heavily in marketing to restore its image after these events.

It appears its efforts have paid off. Despite the drop in short term income, Baidu's year-to-year income was still higher than expected at the beginning of 2009, with the company reporting that it rose 24 percent to $26.5 million.

Google continues its efforts to win over the Chinese market, but Baidu seems to win out every time. Though its aesthetic design is exceedingly similar to that of Google, its internal algorithms are uniquely couched in Chinese culture. The search engine was built by native Chinese who live in China, and thus have the most accurate understanding of how Chinese people search.

For this reason, it is likely that Baidu will continuously corner the Chinese search market. Now that it's targeting its rural consumers, there's no telling how big it could grow.