On the 2018 China International Big Data Industry Expo held in Guiyang on May 26th, Baidu’s founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong announced that Baidu’s “Simple Search” app would never display any ads.
“Simple Search” app was launched in July 2017, but it doesn’t seem to be widely-known until Robin Li’s promise yesterday made it a most-searched keyword.
Jinray SEO has just tried it on iOS and it’s true that it’s ad-free and its speech recognition feature is brilliant, even better than those in some other popular apps in China.
According to Robin Li, this promise is made to ensure the best user experience on Baidu. But since Baidu is a company based on advertising revenues, this ad-free search app is confusing and questionable, especially as Baidu has been taking every opportunity to promote its PPC business (Baidu Tuiguang) and in-feed ads (called as “information flow ads” and displayed on its “Baidu” app) in recent years.
Almost all answers on influential Chinese Q&A community – Zhihu think Li’s words about “no ads” are unbelievable. Some people mentioned “Baidu Netdisk” as an example – Baidu claimed this product would never limit uploading and downloading speeds when it was first launched, but later when it got numerous users, it launched membership and free users couldn’t enjoy unrestricted speed anymore.
Nevertheless, “Simple Search” app is ad-free at the moment, and only organic search results are shown on it. That’s why SEO is still important here.
Update: One new answer under the question on Zhihu said that based on a test on the answerer’s mobile phone, keywords searched on “Simple Search” would influence news feeds on Baidu’s other apps on the same phone, like “Baidu News”. For example, if you search “hair-loss treatment” on Baidu’s “Simple Search”, it’s true that you wouldn’t see any ads of hospitals or therapies, but Baidu would probably portray you as a middle-aged man, and thus feed you with news about gossips between middle-aged men and young girls. That should be how “Search Search” app works in Baidu’s profit model.