Baidu is the dominant internet search engine in China. It retains a strong monopoly over search in China by aligning with government policies, even as it aims to expand into artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, cloud services and other emerging technology arenas against rivals like Alibaba and Tencent.
Some key facts about Baidu:
- Launched in 2000 by cofounder Robin Li, Baidu was modeled after Google and serves a similar web search and online marketing function in China.
- It holds over 70% of the search engine market share in China, handling billions of Chinese-language queries daily.
- In addition to standard web search, Baidu offers additional services like a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia, news search, e-commerce platforms, its own web browser, cloud storage and more.
- While Google exited the Chinese market years ago due to government censorship policies, Baidu agreed to regulate its results and restrict access to certain sites and content banned by Chinese policy.
- Baidu has also faced controversies over the years related to providing pirated content, allowing paid ads promoting frauds/scams, and other incidents that affected users.
- The company trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange (NASDAQ: BIDU) with a market cap over $50 billion. Though growth has slowed, its dominance in Chinese search solidifies it as one of the major global internet platforms.
Baidu Site Verification
All in One SEO (AIOSEO), a 5-star rated WordPress plugin, includes an integration with Baidu Webmaster Tools.
This simplifies the site ownership verification required by Baidu. (Site verification is a precursor to submitting a sitemap to Baidu in order to appear in the search engine’s results pages.)