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 .