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Critic: Baidu has Died as a Search Engine

An editorial titled “Baidu has Died as a Search Engine” becomes popular on Chinese Internet since last night, and according some Chinese news sites, this article has even caused a drop of 6.4% on Baidu’s stock.

The article complains that most search results on Baidu have been occupied by Baidu’s content product called Baidu Baijia.

The author tried keywords of different fields on Baidu but could hardly find any results not from Baidu’s products, especially Baijia Accounts

Baidu Baijia is very similar to WeChat Subscription Account (or called as “WeChat Official Account”) and has a simple profit model for its writers – people read their articles and click on ads beside them, and then the writers would get paid.

But compared to WeChat Subscription Account, Baidu’s Baijia Account requires people to download “Baidu App” to comment on the articles or follow the writers. So people even cannot do such things on their PCs, although Baidu is not a born mobile product like WeChat.

As a result, there is barely any comments below posts on Baidu Baijia, and most traffic of these Baijia accounts come from Baidu’s search results, instead of writers’ followers.

Due to these shortcomings, Baijia account is never a qualified competitor against WeChat Official Account; instead, it’s just a defensive product at best, as WeChat doesn’t open its content API to Baidu.

However, Baidu doesn’t seem to think so, it has higher expectations on products like Baijia Account and Bear Paw Account – the latter was shut down abruptly in the end of 2018.

It offers high authorities to content on these platforms, regardless of the facts that they are hardly good enough and the articles on them are mostly duplicate news or advertorials with little insights.

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