Reasons to like Baidu--but whose reasons are they?

I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China's leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).

This wouldn't bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: "Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number." A quick Google search didn't turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what's the deal guys?

The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge's name on Rick's Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an "upstart" engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu's music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)

On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge's coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell "develop" while saying "men from the east" aren't that smart.

Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there's a "next week" below that doesn't work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here's the list:

1. They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
2. They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent's traffic.
3. They have advertising solutions that can be tailored--as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
4. They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
5. They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
6. Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
7. They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you'd only take less than 8% of their market share...
8. They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don't have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me....
9. They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases....

After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won't likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they're still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that's not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish's public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I'd still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I've written about.

[amaxxx]

I had mentioned this (as max) in response to DeGeest's original comment, but I feel that it should appear here too, so here goes....
Baidu is well aware that their mp3 search has been critical to their success and to publicly reduce their liability, they have been propagating the fact that mp3 search contributes only a low traffic % of their overall traffic, and conveniently quote unreliable Alexa figures. Independent research (including CNNIC) shows that it is pretty substantial. Mp3 search is the main reason for Baidu's strength in China and it has been the cornerstone of their dominance in China. Granted that they have been smart enough to build on it and offer other attractive services as listed above.
However, the fact remains that in all probability Baidu's mp3 'search' is as dirty as they come. Recent reports in Chinese publications have been highlighting the fact that a vast majority of Baidu's music search links are to anonymous 3rd party sites that some say are propped up by Baidu itself. Pretty damning developments and certainly worthy of further nvestigation - this seems to provide a logical explanation on why Baidu's music search service is quite a hit with users, as the music files are always guaranteed to come up as link. It's almost like a localized search for music of a finite number of conveniently placed servers!
It seems that part of DeGeest/ Hodge's beef is with Google being unapproachable compared to Baidu hence the pro-Baidu list.
DeGeest is entitled to his opinion that Baidu staff are "honest, enthusiastic and approachable" but I do think that on the honesty front, their mp3 shenanigans show them up to be dishonest and they are cunningly hiding behind the guise of being just a 'search' engine. As to them being "enthusiastic and approachable", it is obvious that it is more of a reproach to Google's stand-offish and probably arrogant/ aloof attitude in China, and credit to Baidu for seizing their opportunities.