Building China's largest search engine (1)
- Source: The Global Times
- [17:28 June 01 2009]
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Editor's note:
This article has been adapted from the book Red Wired: China’s Internet Revolution, coauthored by Sherman So and J. Christopher Westland. The book is aimed at helping the readers gain a firsthand understanding of how the Chinese combined successful components from their Western counterparts with innovation, to accommodate the unique characteristics of the Chinese market.
By Sherman So and J. Christopher Westland
Li Yanhong, founder of www.baidu.com
As the Internet increases in popularity and the amount of information on the Web explodes, people need a quick way to find information.
Machine-driven search engines, using computer algorithms and databases alone to return results, began to appear in 1993. The initial results of the automated systems were poor. Yahoo’s Web page directories, which are maintained by a group of human editors, were generally more successful at knowing what users wanted.
A breakthrough came in 1996 when two PhD students at Stanford University hypothesized a new search algorithm. Convinced that the pages most useful to the search would be the ones with the most links to them from other relevant Web pages, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tested their thesis and laid Google’s foundation.
For initial Google users it was love at first sight and it achieved the ultimate branding success – its name became a verb meaning to search for information on the Internet.
Profiting from search traffic was Google’s other major breakthrough. Although the idea was not original to Google, it perfected the concept of “cost-per-click” advertisements that appear alongside the search results, where the advertiser pays only when someone clicks on the ad.
Like Google, Baidu started out by licensing its search engine services to other Web sites.
Baidu partnered with the major China portals Sina, Sohu and Netease and also tried to sell its search engine to companies and government agencies for use on their intranet sites.
“We thought a search engine was just a tool. And if someone could provide that [to our users], we were glad to use their services,” said Wang Zhidong, former CEO of Sina, one of China’s top online portals. Before Sina used Baidu for searches, it had partnered with Alta Vista and OpenFind.
But by 2001, Baidu’s founder Li Yanhong was determined to launch an independent search Website. And despite the misgivings of some of his board members, who were afraid of alienating Baidu’s portal partners, he eventually got his way.
But Li had two problems – how to attract advertisers and traffic.