Baidu draws ire of netizens for promoting its own content in search results
- Launched in 2016, Baijiahao is a blog-style platform where about 1.9 million publishers post news and share information
When Baidu launched its Baijiahao platform in 2016, it was touted as the search giant’s answer to ByteDance’s Jinri Toutiao news aggregator and Tencent Holdings' WeChat official accounts, giving independent publishers a platform while helping it generate more advertising revenue from online content.
Two years on and the monetisation strategy has worked wonders, but Baijiahao’s advertising focus has angered some Chinese netizens who criticise the company for failing to provide a search service that provides useful results.
The debate even prompted one outspoken scholar to proclaim “the death of Baidu as a search engine” in an article that has gone viral on social media since Tuesday.
“Baidu.com is no longer where you search for online content in Chinese, but an in-site search of its self-made content,” Fang Kecheng, a Chinese media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an article posted on his public WeChat account. “It’s no longer directing you to high-quality nourishment for minds, but [has become] a hoarder of decaying and deteriorated content.”
Baijiahao is at core of the problem, according to Fang, citing his experience in using searching uses keywords such as “Brexit”, “US government shutdown” and “Trump” – all of which returned Baijiahao content for over half of the first-page results.
