Chinese search engine Baidu.com - Google rival?

The Chinese search engine Baidu has confidently outscored its competitors. Today, it ranks first in China, 8th in North Korea, 10th in Hong Kong, 15th in Japan, 27th in Taiwan and 82nd in the United States. The Baidu search engine has the same popularity in China as Google in Europe.

Google Competitor from China

Baidu is considered one of the largest Internet companies in the world. It was founded in January 2000 by former students Yeric 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 literally translates "a hundred times", "a thousand times" or "countless times". It is taken from the last lines of the poem "The Green Jade Table at the Lantern Festival" by Hsin Tsinzi. It says: "I've been looking for hundreds of times in a crowd, suddenly turning, she, she's there, in the dim light of a burning candle."

The poem tells 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 "search for a dream."

The Golden Shield

Unofficially, the project is called the "Great Chinese Firewall" (a play of words, in meaning as the ancient Great Wall of China and as a network firewall). This is a virtual shield, which is engaged in the filtration of 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.

Also, in addition to the "shield", China uses the technology of DNS-blocking. There is a "black list" of sites, access to which is completely closed. The filtering of web pages occurs by keywords that are indirectly or directly related to the state security.

Chinese Baidu, Sogou and Soso are popular search engines not only at home, but also in Europe. What can not be said about Google, Bing and Yahoo, which are rapidly losing their leading positions in the PRC.

Achievements

How popular is baidu.com? Every day it is visited by about 50 thousand Internet users. It is included in the top 10 most popular and profitable Internet sites, second only to such giants as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Wikipedia.

In mid-2006, the main search engine of China launched the project "Baidupediya" or "Baidu Bayke". For the first 3 weeks, she bypassed the Chinese Wikipedia and became the leader in the country. Encyclopedia Baidu is subject to total censorship, like the search engine itself. At the beginning of 2017, it contains about 14 million articles. In other words, there is more information in Baidupedia than in Russian, English, Chinese and German Wikipedia put together.

According to the world ranking of sites (Alexa Traffic Rank), baidu.com takes the 4th position in the world. The index of the site contains over 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.

President of the company Zhang Yatsin in 2016 announced his ambitious plan. After 5 years, he intends to start mass production of cars (self-controlled).

Competitors

In the Middle Kingdom, Baidu is undoubtedly in the lead. According to experts, it is used by 65% to 85% of the population of China. 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 dreaming to break out into the leaders.

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 focused primarily on the owners of "pirated" or illegal copies of Windows in China. The 360 programs bypass authentication and allow you to install OS updates.

Qihoo actively cooperates with Nokia and Google in the field of mobile search and plans to enter the European markets. Recently, the company bought shares of its competitor Sogou, in connection with which its position in the market can grow by 10%.

The Chinese search engine Soso.com belongs to the largest Internet provider Tencent. The company is the creator of such successful projects as WeChat messengers and QQ, owns the company Riot Games. In mobile search confidently ranked second (15% of the market).

Foreign search engines in China

The system Bing.com, 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 find information on English-speaking resources.

Because of the total censorship of the search engine, Google.com refused to work in China. In 2010, the company closed its representation in the country and relocated to Hong Kong. The share of Google in the Chinese market has significantly decreased and at the moment is 3%.

Thanks to the care of Google, the Chinese search engine Baidu has strengthened its position in the domestic market. And with the opening of the Japanese version it became the second search engine in the world.