Baidu Beat has done a roundup of the2011 top ten "most active" questions on their ask & answer forum “Baidu Knows” (百度知道, bǎidù zhīdào). The number one thing most Chinese people on Baidu are curious about? Bulls. more ›

The Hurun Report has published the top 50 names of this year's Hurun Rich List 2011. Liang Wen'gen, co-founder of heavy machinery company Sany, rose from fourth place to top the list this year with a wealth of $11billion, buoyed by China's economic boom. He edged last year's list-topper Zong Qinghou of drinks conglomerate Wahaha into second place. Zong has seen his wealth shrink from $12 billion to $10.7 billion following profit margin squeeze in the industry, this despite Wahaha chalking up an impressive 30% sales increase. Robin Li Yanhong of Baidu continued his rise on the list to finish at third place this year with a fortune of $8.8 billion. He was helped in no small part by Google's quasi-withdrawal from the Chinese market which allowed Baidu to consolidate its position in the online search market. more ›

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First major casualty in the microblogging arena, more to come? "Baidu yesterday announced it’s shutting down its “Weibo” service, t.baidu.com, by 22 August. Baidu’s Weibo service “Shuo Ba” (or “Talk Bar” in English) started in September last year with a real-name system requiring all registration to be verified via a mobile phone and photos. Having gained no popularity with its real-name system, Baidu made it optional this mid-May with more Weibo look. In the same month, Shuo Ba paused registration, verification and real-time trends. Baidu has shut down the post publishing today and will completely close this service on August 22." [China Internet Watch] more ›

Baidu.com, China’s search engine Goliath, has combined forces with three major American record companies to develop what is hoped to be a breakthrough against music piracy in the People’s Republic. more ›

A group of writers and publishers, including Han Han, have gotten together to collect compensation from the likes of Baidu and Apple for selling their work without permission. more ›

Hey hey! Perhaps Baidu's English language search results might be incrementally less horrendous now: "Chinese search giant Baidu Inc. will use Microsoft's Bing for some English-language results as the software giant tries to expand its small share of China's search market. No financial details of the tie-up between Microsoft Corp. and Baidu were released. Baidu has 75.8 percent of China's search market while Google has 19.2 percent, according to Analysys International, a Beijing research firm. Bing's China market share is so small that Analysys counts it among "others" that have a total of 2.2 percent. In a statement, Baidu vice president Samuel Shen said the agreement with Bing will improve English search for Baidu users and raise Bing's profile in China. Baidu says its site already handles about 10 million English searches daily. Baidu operates a search site in Japan but makes nearly all its revenue in China. Its profit for the first quarter of 2011 more than doubled from a year earlier to 1.07 billion yuan ($163.5 million). Last month, the company announced it was investing $306 million in Qunar, a Chinese travel search engine, to become the company's majority shareholder." [China Daily] more ›

Interesting:

For reasons that remain somewhat unclear, the 2010 Gay Games - which were held in Cologne, Germany in July 2010 - have bizarre landed a place on Baidu’s top ten real-time search rankings. The renewed netizen interest in the event appears to be derived from fresh information that the Chinese media has uncovered concerning last year’s Chinese delegation, a group of eight open homosexuals who competed in the eighth quadrennial Gay Games in Cologne. more ›

Bill Gates and Baidu CEO Robin Li recently announced the joint launch of an anti-smoking initiative entitled “Alliance for Healthy China”. Their slogan “Say no to forced smoking" is meant to encourage smokers to be respectful of their surrounding and not “force” second hand smoke onto their immediate company. Along with educating the public, this campaign is meant to provide resources for current smokers to explore methods that could help them quit. more ›

Congratulations, Chen Wenyuan (陈文原), it looks like your 15 seconds of internet video fame have arrived. Chen, a junior at Fujian Agricultural University now trending as 'Sharp Dish Sorting Brother' (犀利收碗哥), has cracked the top ten on Baidu's internet buzz index, after video of his peerless dish-classification skills was posted online. more ›

Alas, Baidu's ill-gotten intellectual property gravy train is coming to a screeching halt. more ›

To get rich from the internet is glorious: China's biggest social network Renren Inc., is aiming towards a valuation of $743.4 million U.S. dollars for their American initial public offering. According to Bloomberg, at nearly three quarters of a billion, the amount is twice as much as Facebook's future IPO, as valued by Goldman Sachs: more ›

In light of the rumors raging over a Facebook China partnership with Baidu, we decided to check in on the recent China numbers from SocialBakers (a site that monitors Facebook users by country.) Back in February, we saw users more than double following Mark Zuckerberg's visit in December. This month, the numbers are way, way down. Not a gradual drop off, mind you. On April 5, about 40% of Chinese Facebookers disappeared. more ›

Wow. All that speculation, the flirtation, the obsession, but we never thought it would actually happen. Could it be true? According to Sohu and others, yes it could, and probably is. Following all the rumors and Mark Zuckerberg's recent trip to China, Facebook has now reportedly signed a deal with Baidu. more ›

There's been lots of rumours lately that literary bad boy and professional rally driver Han Han is going to write about Baidu's disrespect for copyright in his first column for the NYT. In his latest blog post, Han Han looks at all the victories that Baidu's been winning in court, and wonders aloud if CEO Robin Li's dad is Li Gang. Hilarious!

Yesterday, negotiations between several publishing industry representatives and Baidu broke down. In the early stages, Shen Haobo, Lu Jinbo and Hou Xiaoqiang had told me on various occasions that Baidu has been causing damage to the entire publishing industry, to which I responded: “Let’s sue them”. They then said several cases had been brought against them, none of which were won. Baidu has plenty of money and access, in effect they pretty much control the courts. They also have first rate public relations capabilities, so in addition they control what is being said about them by most media outlets. I sighed and wondered: “Could it be that Robin Li’s dad is Li Gang?” more ›

We totally dig what they're doing over at World of Chinese these days: serving up a daily list of China's trending topics on Baidu and Sina Weibo, in Chinese and English, with full explanation for each topic. Charlie Custer of China Geeks is behind the lists, informative and insightful as always. Super duper interesting, and an excellent way to stay up to date with what's being talked about online in China. more ›

Reports of sightings of Facebook founder and newly-crowned Time Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg in Beijing abound on the internet today. Twitter user @lhiver swears: "I kid you not, I saw Mark Zuckerberg while passing the Yonghegong Lama Temple this morning on my way to work." Sina Tech on Weibo reports: "Baidu employee Wang Mengchen took the following picture during lunch of Robin Li (Baidu founder) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Looks like they were having a great time!"
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If you've ever wanted a nice breakdown of the wealthy upper crust of China, just refer to Forbes. The magazine has just released its China's 400 Richest list and it seems like the rich just can't stop getting richer in this country. more ›

Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant behind Taobao, launched a beta version of it's own search engine, called Etao, last Saturday. The move may be seen as a direct challenge to Baidu, who currently dominate 60% of the search market in China. Described as a "shopping search engine," Etao will also offer a comprehensive search option powered by Microsoft's Bing. With 40% of Alibaba owned by Yahoo, this could be seen as the first big move by foreign investment to fill the hole left by Google.cn's departure. more ›

So the fake homepage ploy worked! Last night Google.cn was able to obtain a new ICP license, allowing it to stay operating in China. But was this a good thing? A round up of the opinions below.
• Giving Google its license was a show of political savvy, according to Paul Denlinger of The China Vortex, but the company is still in big trouble here in China. Despite being safe for now, it's worked itself into an incredibly vulnerable position in the country.
• In fact, they kind of blew it, according to Henry Blodget. Now it's not just censoring websites, it's effectively done as a search engine. All you can do on there is product and music searches.
• "It's really like they're back to Square Two... (not as bad as it could have been, but not as good as Google’s position at the end of last year, when it had about a third of the search market and was in second place behind Baidu)" says analyst Mark Mahaney of Citi.

It's the Monday after G-day and it seems like, despite lecturing the Internet search company from CCTV and its other mouthpieces, China has yet to block it. Phew. Which makes this fun little Internet tool still relevant - it compares searches between Baidu and Google. Apparently, a good 85% of search results are different! Who woulda thought (hint: maybe everyone)? Anyway, I've been amusing myself this morning doing side-by-side searches of controversial terms. You ought to try it too: baigoogledu.com.cn/ more ›

• Meet this 6-year-old, who has 15 fingers and 16 toes, enough to outnumber the current world record of 25. He lives in Harbin. [People's Daily]
• The Rio Tinto trial for Stern Hu and three other Rio Tinto employees has ended, though a verdict on the charges of accepting bribes and stealing commercial secrets won't be announced for a while yet. [New York Times]
• So yeah, Google wasn't able to make it in China. But will any of these touted Chinese internet giants - Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba - really be able to make it out? [New York Times]

It's practically impossible to enforce intellectual property rights in China, which holds the heavyweight title for the world's best pirates (of goods, not actual pirating), and that's espeically true on the 'net. It's even harder to enforce copyrights when even the courts won't admit that rights are even being infringed: a Beijing court ruled yesterday that Baidu's MP3 search engine was not violating any rights by offering downloads. more ›

Just a few days after Google first threatened to leave China, this lil' shanzhai site popped up. The title, Goojje is a pun. The jje part of it sounds like "jie jie (姐姐)" or sister, which mirrors how Google's last syllables sound like "ge ge (哥哥)" or brother. Goojje is also a search engine and offers some sort of social networking service and BBS. more ›

So everyone's been talking in circles about Google potentially leaving China. We've heard that Google will undeniably shut down, and that they might not; that Google is taking a stand for beliefs, or just can't compete in China; that the Chinese government wants to keep politics out of it, and "the Google incident is not just a commercial incident, it is a political incident." more ›

Google may not want to stay here (or well, it kinda does, but you know), but China is having its most internetted year ever! An official report on Friday showed that China's population of internet users jumped by nearly a third to 384 million throughout 2009. That's 86 million more users than 2008 - aka the population of Germany (but more!). more ›

Hilarious, but oh so true. (h/t @KaiserKuo)
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The front page of Baidu.com around early today. The Iranian Cyber Army is also responsible for hacking Twitter a few weeks ago. Your move, China! more ›

We may be getting Hulu here in China! Well, not Hulu exactly. It seems like Providence Equity, investors in Hulu, are now trying to replicate the success of that television streaming site here in China... and they've picked Baidu to help them do it. more ›