Baidu Moving Towards Social Search
Baidu as a search engine, like Google, has built a financially successful business around its paid search program, Baidu Jingjia. In China’s Internet search market, paid search is regarded as the 3rd generation. However, Baidu is actively pursuing the next emerging stage of search - social search!
Baidu CEO Robin Li recently explained, “In the next couple of years, social search in China will become very predominant. Search engines in China at the very moment is at the 3rd generation - paid search. And this is where Baidu is currently positioned and mastered.”
Earlier this year, Baidu has already shown active signs of digging into the social search area by launching some social verticals like Baidu Post and Baidu Baike.
I reckon the following are the 4 generations of Internet search in China:
- The Keyword Count Generation: This is the pre-Google stage, though in China it barely had existed. However in the US, those search engines in the early years were very user-unfriendly in terms of search results. All they did to rank search results was to count the number of keywords (or keyword phrases) entirely based on on-page factors.
- The Link Popularity Generation: This is when Google and PageRank were born.
- The Paid Search / Sponsored Search Generation: PPC advertising programs like Overture, Findwhat, Google Adwords, and Baidu Jingjia emerged to become monetizing channel of the search engines.
- The Social Search Generation
So where does Local Search fit in? Maybe there is no place for it in China.
Posted on October 26, 2006
Filed Under Baidu, China Internet, PPC, SEO |
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[...] Search in China appears to be a unique phenomenon. For example, pay-for-placement is frequently viewed as unethical in the U.S. but perfectly acceptable in China. However, paid search is rapidly being viewed as the last generation, with social search as the next frontier that must be achieved to stay ahead of the competition. This was well-addressed in a post by Gordon Choi: Baidu as a search engine, like Google, has built a financially successful business around its paid search program, Baidu Jingjia. In China¹s Internet search market, paid search is regarded as the 3rd generation. However, Baidu is actively pursuing the next emerging stage of search  social search! [...]
[...] It is suspected the changes are to make Baidu a more sociable portal, besides simply a search engine. This is exactly where the Chinese online population culture and Baidu are moving towards. Find out more on this topic from my previous post Baidu Moving Towards Social Search. However, comparing to other Chinese search engines’ home pages which are stuffed with flashy and moving ads, Baidu’s approach is still to focus on simplicity and better usability. [...]