Baidu – A History Of The Search Dominator In China

2000 is the year when Baidu (www.baidu.com) was founded. It's creators, Robert Li and Eric Xu used their own patented technology to create the search engine. By the time Google thought of creating a Chinese search engine in 2006, Baidu had already planned on dominating the market and formulating ways to get clients to stick with them.

How the idea of Baidu came about

The name Baidu, which comes means a hundred times. The name was picked from a popular play known as Song Dynasty. The company began with just seven employees. The number has grown to 3000 for the next several years. The founder of the company is one Robin Li whose net worth as per 2007 was $2.4 billion thanks to the company's success. At a conference in StanfordUniversity, Li said his success was as a result of right timing. The number of internet users grew from 8 million to 160 million.

How the company succeeded

www.baidu.com - Logo

Li invested capital worth $1.2 million in starting the company. By the time it reached 2007, the company was worth $13.3 billion in stock shares. It made its income from advertising. The company was meant to promote people who were using the Internet to set up their own businesses.

For customers to have their websites appear in search engines, they had to pay a small amount of fee thus giving them higher rankings. This resulted in greater sales.
By the time it reached 2005, the number of online customers had reached over 41, 000. Ever since then, the net worth of the company kept on rising and rising. By the time it reached February 2012, profits were way over 77%. The number of active online customershas also increased.
Improved monetization and increased traffic growth were the main reasons that enabled the search engine to thrive.

Baidu scandals

Despite being successful, the company has undergone very many scandals. Their sole mission was to provide its users with a variety of information which includes multimedia files, images news and web pages in Chinese language. The following are some of the problems that the company has had to face since its inception:
The company was exposed in 2008 by China Central Television as having accepted money in order to increase the chances of certain businesses appearing on the search results. This included companies in the field of medicine being featured even though they were bogus. Many customers went to these clinics expecting to get adequate services.

On the other hand, companies that did not have something to give to the Baidu people, their search engine results were blocked from appearing in the results. Baiduhowever released a statement saying that they do not tolerate such habits.

As a result of the scandal, the company's stock value went down and the customer complaints also increased. Several people lost their jobs during the scandal and Li said that he was even prepared to sackmore of them.
Last year, the company faced a suite filed with the United States. The suit claimed that there as a collusion between the government and Baidu to block speech that promotes pro-democracy.
The copyright violations was another issue that portrayed the company in bad light.

Read another great article about the history of the search engine HERE .

Pinterest - What It Is, History

When it comes to social media, people are so much addicted with this trend. They always want to find new things that they can use in order to express themselves and enjoy. What is Pinterest (pinterest.com) and how can you enjoy this new, quickly gaining momentum site? To give you more information about it, Pinterest is the newest social phenomenon that has hit the masses. It is a platform wherein you can share and pin your pictures on a board of yours. The sharing of pictures can also allow you to create categories of pin for your pictures, photograph, and share them with all your friends. In addition to this, you can also share monetary gifts, pin some videos and even join group discussions.

www.pinterest.com

Basically, Pinterest started as a scrapbooking website in which the users can post their pictures of their pets, vacation, friends and family on their boards and share them with their other friends. It was more of a hobby and a spare time type website. But when the website started to grow and the users also started to see the potentials of the website they turned it into a social media which you can see now. They added some important features and now it became the Pinterest which has a wide variety of things that you can do like interior decorating, wedding planning and also marketing.

Almost everyone and anyone can use this website. There are no certain regulations or requirement needed as long as you are capable of taking care of the site and you know how to use them. All the people that use this site are enjoying because they can organize their photos and share them with the world. The business owners have also seen their potentials and use the website to share their products and distribute their brand message to the world. For those who don’t know how to use Pinterest, it is just easy. Just go to Pinterest.com and learn how to set up your own account and once you are in you can now enjoy the ride.

Here are some of the main reasons why people are using Pinterest:

• To share some information; people can use the site to post their ideas, recipe and other important information
• To share some photos with their family and friends
• To promote business – Pinterest can also be a great way to promote your business or share your product’s picture in the world. You can also use the site to showcase the talent that you have to offer.
• Gather inspiration from Pinterest. Anyone in the world can post their favorite quotes or other inspirational moments in their board. By doing these things you can help other people who can see your posts to be inspired.

Just like the other social media sites today you can also find your friends and share them your special moments through the Pinterest. Take time to explore new things and have the chance to make the Pinterest your own personal scrapbook now.
Read the history of Pinterest here.