Baidu: China's Most Popular Search Engine & Its Advantages - Essay Sample

Introduction

Baidu is known to be the most popular search engine in China because it is perceived as a Chinese brand with superior technology. Headquartered in Haidian District Beijing, the company was incorporated in the year 2000. It also provides additional services that other companies like Google does not offer such as messaging, entertainment, news, and email. Baidu search engine has emerged to be the search engine of choice for most of the people who use the internet regularly in China. As a result, the search engine has become ground-zero for companies desiring to expand their businesses in China. Following a report published by the Search Engine Journal, Baidu controls 56.8% of the search share in the Chinese market.

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In the narrative about Baidu invention, although the company does not narrate about their downtimes and failures, the description implies that the brand was formed with the Chinese people in mind and had specific tools that accommodated the diverse needs of the Chinese users (Vaughan, 15). The company draws its identity from its intention to serve the Chinese clients and hence was designed with this customer segment in mind. Recognizing such user-specific features defines a clear identification of the company in relation to its customers (Vaughan, 15)

Problems

Despite Baidu search engine being a popular search engine with superior technology, it also has some problems. The first is when downloading routine software updates, the Baidu browser does not have special encryptions. As a result of this, the hacker can easily install malicious software on phones and computers secretly. According to Song, the hackers can strike the target precisely without leaving many pieces of evidence about the culprits. The Baidu browser is also capable of leaking users' location, browsing history and other data owing to the weak or missing encryption whenever the browser is used (Jiang, 212). Monitoring someone's traffic using hardware's serial numbers is very easy. Besides, more data is leaked through the browser's window including the computer's serial number. Consequently, any person, company or even the government can spy on the user's habit online.

Secondly, Baidu Android and Windows versions do not protect software updates with code signature. Because of this, a hacker can cause an application to download and apply a random code and this presents a significant security threat (Jiang, 212). Most users have no way of knowing that their data is being transmitted this way, and would be unable to prevent it. Most of these susceptibilities according to research are as a result of weak encryption used by software development kits present in more than 20,000 applications related to Baidu which have downloaded billions been of times (Song, pg. 91).

Thirdly, Baidu search engine has repeatedly been disparaged for its insatiability, over-commercialization as well as dubious ethics. Baidu users believe that the search engine is extremely commercialized and ethically challenged. Baidu was accused of piling its search results with pages hosted on its Baijiahao service, thus leading to poor quality content rising to the top of searches. In addition, the company was accused of providing biased health-related results sometime back. Recently, a Chinese man died from rare cancer after seeking treating from a hospital that appeared at the top of the list on the Baidu web search. Unfortunately, after seeking treatment from that particular hospital, the man eventually died. Before his death, he accused the hospital of misinforming him about the treatment effectiveness and criticized the company for vending search listings for medical information to the highest bidder (Jiang, pg. 212).

Solutions

Websites should be designed with specific aspects in mind, such as rules and norms as well as a code of ethics to ensure that all internet activities are carried out with transparency. Based on this, following the guidelines of search engines for optimizing visibility safeguards that the ever-changing algorithms applied by search engines achieve clarity (Jiang, 212). The main objective of the webmasters is to have their sites positioned at the top of the list of results returned in a web search. It is very vital to know how network search engines find content as well as the measures to be used to rank sites.

To be successful, the web builder must understand what search engines like and what they do not like because mistakes in page design are the most common restrictive factor to placement. In addition to that, they are widespread on many web pages (Song, 92). Baidu ought to have a higher keyword density of about 8%-12%. The company, however, recently updated its spam-combating algorithm. As argued by Song, keywords must be relevant to the content. Besides, keyword stuffing, which generally occurs when brands try to reach a high keyword density through an unusual placement of targeted keywords must be, avoided (Song, 92).

Work Cited

Jiang, Min. "The business and politics of search engines: A comparative study of Baidu and Google's search results of Internet events in China." New media & society 16.2 (2014): 212-233. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027436

Vaughan, Liwen, and Yue Chen. "Data mining from web search queries a comparison of google trends and Baidu index." Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66.1 (2015): 13-22. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi.23201

Song, Peijian, et al. "Brand extension of online technology products: evidence from search engine to virtual communities and online news." Decision support systems 49.1 (2010): 91-99. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1750137