Google No, Baidu Yes; Poetry Inspires Top Chinese Search Engine

Baidu now dominants the Chinese search engine

arena. Still, a few other players are struggling for a piece of the action. Among the main competitors are Chinese companies with the unfamiliar names of SoGou and SoSo, and the Chinese divisions of elsewhere giants Bing and Yahoo.

When Google withdrew, Baidu was there to take up the slack. To its competitors’ consternation, it gobbled up some of their territory too as the already giant Chinese search engine company expanded. At the end of the first quarter 2010, Baidu held 64 percent of the market. The threat from similar companies is small. Each of the so called major players garner less than one percent of China’s search engine market. Even against some big names, the domestic contenders have the advantage of understanding the Chinese environment.

Google tried to overcome the cultural barrier. Wang Jing had been the engineering director for their Google China operations. But he was charmed away by home-grown Baidu to become their vice president of engineering. Baidu says it focuses on what it knows best - Chinese language search. They contend that “applying avant-garde technology to the world's most ancient and complex language is as challenging as it is exciting.”

Part of its success can be attributed to the fact the company allows "Pinyin" search. Pinyin is the official system for representing Mandarin with the Roman alphabet, whereby users can type Chinese keywords using English alphabets. This shortcuts switching from English input to Chinese input and facilitates searches when the user is not sure of the written form of a keyword.

The company is name is derived from Chinese folklore, the name being derived from an 800 year old Song Dynasty poem by Xīn Qìjí. In addition to Night of the Shangyuan Festival, his works included political and military themes. In ancient China, girls were cloistered at home, and the Lantern Festival was one of the few times they could be out in public. In the crowded chaos of lantern lights, they would sneak away to meet their admirer and exchange promises to meet again next year. The Chinese search engine company drew from the ending stanza: “Hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.” The company explains: “Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.”

According to SEO.com, Baidu focuses on the quantity, rather than the quality, of links, putting emphasis on the title, but also looking at other metatags such as description and keywords. It also adheres to the no adult content, no anti-China material regulations.

Baidu is led by Robin Li, founder and CEO. His cross-scholastic training set him up for working in a multi-lingual environment, with a BS in Information Management from Peking [Beijing] University, and an MS in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He founded Baidu in 2000. The company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.

If you’re willing to place bets on the Chinese search engine market, Baidu’s NASDAQ symbol is BIDU. Over the past 52 weeks, Baidu stock has swung from a low of $23.22 to a high of $82.29, and is holding well at $73.18 as of May 17. Their first quarter 2010 revenues were more than 59 percent higher than the same period last year. Net income in the first quarter of 2010 was RMB480.5 million ($70.4 million USD). Much of Baidu’s revenue is being generated from Phoenix Nest, its advertising system which is comparable to Google's AdWords in functionality.

For companies with less than one percent of the business, you wonder why Baidu’s competitors keep trying. Because 1 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing. At 1 percent of the 384 million Chinese Internet users that’s still more than 3 million potential customers.

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