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Once www.people.cn (the website of People's Daily) built a search engine and failed. If Chinese government stole search technology from Google, why would it give it to Baidu not to a search engine set up by its mouthpiece?

Baidu had already been popular in China before Google officially entered China, so there is no 'this is how Baidu got started' thing.

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No idea if they stole anything and I wouldn't/couldn't/won't make any claims about that etc. but what I've seen of Baidu's open sourced offerings, they are based on Google's publically promoted/published designs down to the types of components (their own implementations of protobuf RPC, GFS, etc.), class names, API C++ style, etc.

Lots of others have done this (some parts of Facebook, too) and I don't think this was based on Google source code or anything, but it doesn't exactly smell terribly innovative on its own?

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