Baidu’s Search Results Turning into Pure Advertising
Blogger Marc van der Chijs’ looks at how Baidu is taking advantage of being the only search engine in town now that Google has left for Hong Kong:
One big difference between Baidu and Google is how the paid results are mixed with organic search results. Both sites insert paid results, but Google gives them a yellow background so that it’s clear that they are different from the normal search results. Baidu does not do that, they look exactly the same as normal results, except for the characters 推广（tui guang) after the ad. Normal results have 白度快照 (Baidu kuai zhao). Of course the average Chinese netizen probably does not know this.
This is nothing new, they have done this for a long time already. But what changed over the past few weeks, is that they now don’t sell 2 or 3 paid positions, but for some keywords up to 10 positions! For example, if you do a search for the Chinese word for game (游戏), the first 10 results are all paid results.