Baidu: China's Leading Search Engine

At Baidu, fifty percent of the products were developed as part of a Research and Development (R&D) strategy with the aim of generating revenue through sales of ads by placing them in the search results. The remaining were developed based on users'requests and the trends in the market. All of Baidu's products were search related and were categorized into web search - that included web pages, advanced search, snapshots, translation, spell checker, stock quotes; Baidu News - which provided local, national, and international news by displaying links to related headlines; Baidu Image Search - which enabled users to search for images on the Internet;...

The majority of web surfers in China preferred Baidu as their primary search engine as it offered a variety of features and a more stable connection than its competitors. Analysts felt that Baidu's rise in China was mainly due to the fact that it obeyed the local laws and was in the government's good books. It was only when the government blocked access to Google that Baidu had registered a sudden increase in the number of users and moved up in the rankings, they pointed out...