Photo: Baidu.com

In the China search engine market, Baidu already holds an unrivaled position and the only thing that can stop it now seems to be itself. The Chinese Strategic Research Body, Airui has just published a report that states that in 2008 Baidu reached a record 73.2% of Chinese searches, a historic achievement for any search engine.

Baidu just keeps growing from strength to strength and the figures for 2008 show a jump of 0.6% over 2007 – a big growth in terms of search engines. “This gain in the Chinese search engine market comes from the huge investments in R&D (Research and Development) that we’ve seen recently at Baidu” said CEO Li Yanhong.

Indeed, it has probably slipped the attention of most web users, but from Baidu’s inception they have been investing in better and better search technologies. “Baidu it and you’ll find it” is the translation of the slogan on Baidu’s home page, but in order to meet that promise to the users, a lot has to go on behind the scenes.

“Our search wait time has been reduced to an average of 0.001 seconds which has meant a change in the servers and changing countless lines of code” a Baidu engineer told our reporter.

It is through the day to day upgrades and tinkering of Baidu engineers that the engine has grown into the beast it is today. According to the statistics office there is an average of 10 or so bugs and other areas that need to be straightened out somewhere in the system.

Over the Olympic period the Baidu team worked hard to overhaul all Olympic related keywords. For example, when people searched for ‘Birds Nest’ they not only got pictures and maps of the area and how to get there, they also got sites listing all the events and their times. All the hard work paid off, stats showed an extra 1 billion hits during the Games.

Everyone knows that the search engine business burns money. All those computers and countless technicians, with the hits slowly accruing. However, from looking at Baidu’s budget they devote a third to R&D, that’s a huge RMB 1 billion for 2008.

Photo: deanj

All of this has been overseen by Baidu’s recently appointed IT wizard, Li Yi’nan, who now heads up the R&D team and given them a new lease of life. In December 2008, Baidu opened a new R&D center in Shanghai, adding yet another string to their bow.

In the light of so many years of continued growth, and given the strength of their market hold in China at present, the question on some people’s lips is, ‘what does the future hold for Baidu?’

According to Chinese internet users statistics, Baidu currently covers 92.2% of Chinese language internet and is forecast to become the first engine to give 100% coverage in the coming year or two. With those figures there doesn’t seem like too much to be worried about from where Baidu is sitting.

At the end of 2008 Baidu unveiled the ‘Aladdin Project’, a system designed to unlock the remaining hidden information on the internet. Under the slogan of “There’s no Best, Only Better”, Aladdin uses a complex set of algorithms which is designed to allow for the most comprehensive and complex searches yet of the internet in Chinese. With all of this they hope to better serve China’s over 300 million internet users.

***

Expat Corner > The Battle’s Frontline – China’s Internet Cafés

Biz China > U.S. chipmaker plans rural push for growth in China

Biz China > Selling in Hard Times

Warning：The use of any news and articles published on eChinacities.com without written permission from eChinacities.com constitutes copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken.