PALO ALTO, Calif.--Baidu CEO Robin Li, on a rare visit to Silicon Valley Wednesday, explained the rise of his company's search engine in China before a group of students more interested in entrepreneurial tips than censorship.
Baidu CEO Robin Li advised Stanford students to make sure they understand the Chinese market if they want to do business there.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)Li ended a trip to the U.S. Wednesday at Stanford University, speaking to a crowd of several hundred students about the lessons he learned shepherding Baidu through the first dot-com bust and growing it into the Google of China. Baidu has 76 percent of the Chinese search market, he said, which consists of 338 million Internet users: larger than the entire population of the U.S.
The key to Baidu's success amid a terrible recession for Internet companies in late 2000 and 2001 was careful use of the initial venture capital investment in his company and making a tough decision to overhaul Baidu's business model from providing back-end search technology to portals to designing its own front-end user interface, Li said. He also outlined his vision for future search called "box computing," which seemed to involve a Chrome OS-style user interface that would run independently of the operating system as the start page for a new generation of computers and use semantic technology to deliver a search result more in tune with the searcher's intention.
Li was given a very warm reception from the students, who massed around him after his talk to have their pictures taken with one of China's most prominent CEOs. Only one student hinted at the censorship dance required to operate a search engine in China, asking Li how his company manages the tricky relationships with regulators.
The Internet is new everywhere, Li said, but it's especially new to China. That means that regulations haven't always anticipated the issues that can arise on the Internet and lag the pace at which the Internet evolves, he said. But he otherwise avoided any mention of Baidu's role in preventing Web pages that run afoul of the Chinese government from appearing in Baidu's search results: a 2008 study by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab found that Baidu censors far more search results than competitors.
Most of the questions came from students who wanted to know how American companies can break into the fast-growing Chinese market. Li said there's no substitute for having a local presence in China, and not to underestimate the growth of the Internet in China. Baidu's search index triples every year, he said, and competitors often can't keep pace with that growth, meaning they do not offer all the pages that Chinese Web surfers seek.
"If you can't find it on Baidu, you can't find it anywhere else," Li said. That, of course, can be interpreted in a number of different ways.
Internet search continues to skyrocket around the world with Google's dominance unchecked.
ComScore came out with worldwide search market share numbers Monday, which revealed that Internet searches increased by 41 percent to 113 billion in just the month of July. Slightly more than two-thirds of all those searches were done with Google, which also saw the number of searches done with through engine increase 58 percent compared with last year.
Yahoo is a distant second with 8.9 billion searches in July, while China's Baidu ranked third with 8 billion searches. Both of those sites posted slow growth in July, while fourth-place Microsoft increased the number of searches performed on its site by 41 percent compared with last year, perhaps thanks to the renovation of its search business in Bing.
ComScore also released statistics by geographic region: the Europeans searched the most in July, but residents of Latin America were responsible for the most searches per person.
Worldwide search market share numbers released by ComScore on Monday.
(Credit: ComScore)
U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama appears in cartoon form on the logo of Chinese search engine Baidu.
(Credit: Baidu)Chinese-language search engine Baidu has an unusual new mascot atop its home page: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
A cartoon version of Obama is depicted next to a donkey, the Democratic party emblem. He's holding a net as though casting it, and attached to the end of the net is a computer mouse--get it? It's the Internet.
This is part of a "person of the month" feature that Baidu has instituted since November, the blog Shanghaiist explains. Each month, Baidu selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. As Shanghaiist explains, it's "a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis." Barack Obama is the sixth installment in the series.
The series is hosted on the domain renwu.baidu.com; "renwu" means "historically important person."
While the biography of Obama on Baidu is largely celebratory, this is not a formal endorsement of the candidate. It is, however, an endorsement of his Web-savviness. Clicking on the Obama-adorned logo on Baidu redirects to a Chinese-language biography of the candidate and links to various media; the central talking point is Obama's status as a young politician who has successfully leveraged digital media and the Web to rise to fame. Of particular note, according to his Baidu page, is his speech about race in Philadelphia that soared to the YouTube stratosphere after appearing on television earlier.
But of more local relevance, the Baidu site about Obama also highlights the high volume of Chinese search queries for both Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Charts and graphs detail politics-related searches both Chinese and international. There are also information resources pertaining to what the U.S. presidential election means to China, and what Chinese citizens think about it.
"State and world affairs have become the most popular topics of concern for Internet users," a translation of part of Baidu's page about Obama reads. It doesn't seem to mesh particularly well with the Chinese government's rigid stance on the spread of information, particularly political rhetoric, on the Web.
Nor was it clear whether the Obama campaign would react positively, considering the tense relationship between the U.S. and China. Calls to the campaign's press office for comment were not immediately returned.
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