While many in the West may not know much about Baidu, it is a major player in China, with billions of online searches being carried out every single day.
Although Google may dominate the world of SEO throughout the Western world, often referred to as ‘Chinese Google’, Baidu is the 4th most visited site on the planet.
However, Baidu is much more than a search engine; it’s also a giant tech company specialising in AI and internet-related services.
In fact, it’s one of the world’s biggest AI and internet companies.
In this article, we’ll look more at what exactly Baidu is, including its history and influence, its importance and market share, as well as how it works in SEO terms compared to other search engines such as Google.
What is Baidu?
Baidu Inc. is the company behind the most popular search engine in China, and in 2020 it had amassed 1.1 billion users. As it is China-based, the majority of the searches performed on the platform are done in Mandarin on smartphones, thanks to the Baidu app.
While Baidu is best known as a search engine, the company also offers other services. These include a mapping service (Baidu Maps), an online encyclopaedia (Baidu Baike), and a keyword-based forum (Baidu Tieba, or Baidu Post Bar), as well as online marketing solutions.
Baidu’s History
Baidu Inc. was founded in 2000 by Eric Xu and Robin Li. By the early 90s, Li had a deep passion for software development and created the programme while working for Dow Jones and Co.
In fact, even before establishing the company, Li was well-known as one of the primary experts on search engines, becoming famous for his work on hyperlink analysis technology and algorithms during the same period.
By 1999, Li was back in China, where he met biochemist Eric Xu and together they decided to capitalise on the growth of the internet industry in China by creating Baidu.
According to both men, the inspiration behind the name of the Chinese search engine Baidu comes from a poem written during the Song Dynasty over 800 years ago. Translated into English, Baidu means ‘hundreds of times’ and represents persistence when searching for perfection.
The Importance of Baidu
Baidu is a formidable force that deals with a huge amount of daily traffic. To put it into perspective, imagine a world without Google.
Pretty impossible to imagine, right?
As the Chinese equivalent, Baidu enables users from across China to access any web page they need.
If you don’t live in China, it might be easy to underestimate the power Baidu yields in China compared with other websites dealing with internet search requests, but the influence Baidu has is substantial.
Baidu’s Worldwide Market Share
Regarding worldwide market share, Baidu holds just 1.45% of the global market.
However, when it comes to the Chinese market share, Baidu has an impressive 72.37%, compared with Google’s less than 2% market share.
In China, the only way for internet users to access Google is through a VPN, which opens the door for Baidu to continue dominating the playing field.
This is why Chinese and international businesses are keen to rank well on the platform.
Other than Baidu, there are a host of other large companies such as WeChat, Sogou, Shenma and 260 Search who are vying for user loyalty and market share.
The Baidu Company
Baidu believes its mission is to make the world a simpler place through the advancement of technology. By 2010, the company was adopting artificial intelligence in order to simplify online content discovery and was one of the first companies to do so.
Baidu’s core AI technology engine, ‘Baidu Brain,’ is used to develop brand new AI businesses, and they are one of only a handful of companies worldwide that offers a full-stack AI.
This infrastructure includes core AI capabilities, like knowledge graph, speech recognition, augmented reality, natural language processing (NLP), as well as AI chips and deep learning framework.
Baidu also has plans to put its leading AI capabilities into further products and services.
How Does Baidu Work?
While undoubtedly, there are stark similarities between both Baidu and Google, when it comes to SEO, both companies’ strategies are vastly different.
Meta descriptions, tags and keywords
In the last few years, Google has taken somewhat of a step back when it comes to the importance of keywords, tags and meta descriptions, now focusing more heavily on the relevance, user intent and overall quality of a site.
Baidu, however, remains committed to the traditional SEO factors.
Mobile-friendliness
Baidu places a lot of emphasis and importance on mobile-friendly websites, much more than the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing, as they have over a billion active mobile users.
Images
In order to rank on Baidu, the use of alt-text is imperative as Baidu cannot process images as well as Western search engines.
Content
Websites throughout China need to keep their data in order and update their web content much more frequently than those in other countries. Why? Baidu likes it, so those web pages that are topped up with quality content that’s up-to-date will display higher on the Baidu results page.
One major positive regarding this search engine is that implemented SEO practices are quicker to show positive results on Baidu than on other major search engines.
