Baidu is under Strong Criticism

Though Baidu.com, the biggest Chinese Internet search service provider in the world, recorded an increase of 119% in sales for the third quarter of 2008, its auction result ranking service is under criticism.

Recently some users of Baidu.com accused it of manipulating the search result based on how much money it gets from its users. Meanwhile, some Internet companies such as Sina, Sohu, Tencent, Netease, which used to be partners of Baidu, have put an end to the partnership with Baidu and ganged up together to boycott it.

Chinese B2B bellwether Alibaba.com alerted lately Baidu.com of its termination of advertising on Baidu.com.

Spokesperson from the public relationship department of Alibaba.com says that they chose to end advertising on Baidu.com for the poor advertising effectiveness.

Latest statistics show that website traffic of Baidu.com has been on the decline year by year. What is more, there are huge amount of ineffective anonymous traffic. And the page views brought by Baidu.com can hardly meet the specific need of small and midsize customers of Alibaba.com.

As early as the yearend of 2007, Taobao.com, a brother- sister company of Aliaba.com, stopped advertising on Baidu.com with a view to failed service offered by Baidu.com.

Taobao.com said today that instead of decline its website traffic soared 180% by the end of this September since it started to block off inappropriate Internet search services in November 2007.

And Taobao.com has blocked off all Internet search services of Baidu.com, the biggest Chinese Internet search service provider in the world.

The over-commercialized search ranking result of Baidu.com make profits at the price of equity and the attractiveness of the Internet search engine. A lot of rubbish websites and individual entertainment websites have been ranked top by taking the advantage of the SEO rules of Baidu.com.

Industry analysts say that such move of Internet companies will trigger far-reaching and wide-ranging discussions about the long-term sustained development of the Internet in China.
By shielding the Internet search engines, Taobao hopes to keep illegal sellers from cheating online shoppers via search ranking.

Baidu announced its expansion into the C2C sector in October 2007. Since March 2008, the company has been engaged in large scale marketing campaigns around the country in a bid to attract sellers to settle down in its C2C platform.

Following the heels of C2C portal Taobao.com and social networking websites Xiaonei.com and Hainei.com, Zhongsou.com, a leading individual portal service provider, blocked off the Internet search service of Baidu.com on September 12, the biggest Chinese Internet search service provider.