Just how good is Baidu?

One man’s protest during the presentation by Baidu’s billionaire CEO Robin Li, at his annual artificial intelligence event has gone viral on Chinese social networks, unleashing a wave of protests about poor service from a company that manages China’s main search engine, with a 66% market share on computers and 71% on smartphones.

The assailant spent five days in prison after pouring water over the head of the CEO in early July (video), who remained calm, asking him in English “What’s your problem ?” Since then, the scene has even been captured on t-shirts.

Leaving aside Western concerns about the high levels of censorship on China’s Internet, which seems to matter rather little to the majority of users in the country, what’s the average Chinese user’s Baidu experience? predominant? China’s internet ecosystem is very different to most Western countries: the three local giants, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, are locked in a fierce battle to control the search engine market. Western competitors, who are well recognized, either do not offer their services in the country due to government restrictions or are kept very much on the margins, as is the case of Google through its subsidiary in Hong Kong.

What is China’s search ecosystem like? While there is no formal search neutrality in the West, attempts are made to establish it within certain limits by mechanisms such as anti-monopoly legislation, which has been applied in certain jurisdictions when Google has tried to bias results in favor of its own products. In general, network neutrality is something the average user expects, within certain limits: our memory of the old search engines of the pre-Google era, generally very editorialized and that often provided sponsored results, is negative, and most people’s concern is usually about excessive levels of personalization — the filter bubble described by Eli Pariser— than any excessively marked bias toward the company’s products.

How does this work in China with its predominant search engine? Everything indicates that the big three’s carve up of the internet market and the absence of strong anti-monopoly legislation has led Baidu to significantly editorialize its index toward its own pages, products and services. The protests of a few weeks ago now extended to the Chinese internet, together with the fact that a search engine like Google was used by a third of the market in a very short time before its decision to leave the country, indicate that satisfaction with the search engine, despite its predominant market share, it is not too high. The many Chinese students with whom I have occasion to exchange comments on these subjects tend to think that their life was better when Google was available and that Baidu, despite its dominance in machine learning, provides clearly biased and excessively editorialized results.

What’s happened in China is, to say the least, interesting: a market like most Western countries, with a competitor like Google with a market share typically above 90%, should have produced a product with better functionality and user experience, creating a much more competitive market in the process, but with a much weaker, more favorable and more tolerant regulatory system. Food for thought.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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