The new Google? Baidu's big plans to bust out of China | Hacker News Reader

The new Google? Baidu's big plans to bust out of China

newscientist.com

27 pointsnkurz48 comments

I hate to call Baidu a 'chinese knock off', but in the purest sense of the word it is. They simply take Western internet phenomenons; Street Maps, Open collaborative encyclopedia, crawler based search engine, even a TV/youtube service which I've used to watch star trek (TNG torrents post season 6-7 get very slow and netflix didn't exist at the time). And copy their feature sets, even stealing whole american templates. Last time I used Baidu's video service they literally stole their layout and color scheme from pornhub down to ad placement and video selection.

Lastly Betteridge's Law of Headlines.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

>I'm not a racist, but I think all the Chinese do is copy other people's work.

> I'm not a racist, but when a country has almost no IP protections and artificially limits access to international competitors via a firewall, it sets up an environment where copying other peoples' work is a very low-risk and profitable proposition.

If their web spider is any indication of how fit they are, they really need to shape up.

The Baidu spider is the IE6 of web bots, it hammers sites, fumbles around breaking everything with its crap JavaScript compiler and causing so many errors that it's easier to just block it. The same with Yandex.

I really hope they fix it, but a search for the Baidu user agent will show a lot of results just wanting to block it. They need to fix that.

> Baidu is the biggest search engine in China, beating Google as well as local competitors like Sogou and 360

That's not terribly surprising given that Google has been blocked in China since June 1.

https://en.greatfire.org/google.com

More relevantly, Google pulled out of China in 2010 after refusing to comply with censorship requirements. They had a 31% share at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

They were not blocked until June, however. And now they are almost completely shut out.

Would be fascinating to see them compete in markets without state influence.

People don't trust Google as it is, why would they trust China's "Google"?

The fact that Google has destroyed user trust is what gives Baidu an opening.

"I am not trusting Google with my data, because it's in bed with US government too much.

Instead, I will trust BaiDu, that's even more in bed with far more oppresive goverment."

I don't know about that.

The people who would follow this argument would likely refuse to concede that there is a government more oppressive than that of the United States.

In other words - it's not an appeal to reason, it's an appeal to emotion and nationalism. Or anti-nationalism, as regards the US.

An American may look at it that way. A European may look at it that way. Would an African? Would a South American?

Depends where you live. Americans have much more to fear from other Americans than they have from the Chinese government. Hell, I'm British and I have more to fear from the US than China. At least my government wont extradite me to China on a whim.

That sounds like a problem with your government rather than the US. If they are agreeing to extradite people who haven't committed a serious crime, you should be voting to change that.

I wasn't blaming the US. The fact remains, the US can do me more damage than China can. If I had to choose between surveilled services in China or surveilled services in the US, I'd go China every time. Same with hardware. I'd rather have bugged Chinese hardware than bugged American hardware.

Obviously, I'd rather not have bugged hardware or be using surveilled services in the first place. Also, you can replace "American" with "British" above, and the argument would still apply.

"U.S government can easily send drones to my country to shoot me, or at least force my country to get me extradicted, or their secret service could just take me to Guantanamo without anyone noticing" vs "Yes, Chinese government is much more oppressive than U.S, but they are not likely to share data with my government, or to get me in any way unless I decide to go to China".

Heck, even if I were US citizen, I would trust Baidu more. Especially if I were US citizen. If you have to share your data, it's better to share it with someone that can't get you easily, or won't share it further with someone that can.

In what example is the US Government killing, kidnapping, torturing, or droning citizens of other countries on any meaningful scale basis outside of a few obvious countries like Afghanistan?

What does someone in Brazil, or Peru, or Belgium, or Russia, or China, or Spain, or Japan, or Australia etc etc - have to fear from the US Government? Absolutely nothing, even with all the understood spying abuses that have taken place. Most likely 99.999% of the world will never have anything to fear from the US Government.

The primary threat is actually economic espionage, from all the major powers. On that field of battle, China is arguably the world's largest threat, they have the most to gain from stealing technology from other countries (Japan, the US, Britain, Germany, Russia, France).

That is probably true, but if you read the newspapers you'd think otherwise. The US has a pretty good humanitarian track record, but every little thing gets blown up outside of proportion.

And of course, the US has an economic system that the world politically hates. It's not socialist, so it's constantly held up as an example of how bad things can be in Europe. America's economy is huge, very free and not a dictatorship, so every middle eastern country, China, and so on are very afraid of it, making sure that every media available in the country regularly excoriates it. Problem is that the US press picks up on an article from these places on a regular basis and reprints a rewrite of it.

Impressions matter more than actual substance. Otherwise China, or for that matter Palestine, would be looked at very differently.

Do you have examples of where people have been extradited from other countries due to NSA collected data? I'm also curious about the drone part. I know they have been used in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to kill. Have there been cases where they've picked off people in London, etc?

The American government kidnapping people to torture at Gitmo or bombing people's homes into rubble over Google searches isn't something that actually happens. So, it's not something choosing another search engine can reliably protect against.

There are enough examples of US government / secret services doing exactly this. Have they used NSA and Google data? No evidence, but do you really expect they will have a press release? Until Snowden only loonies "knew" that USA/NSA is spying on regular people at al.

It would be hard to prove whether the NSA provided the data but someone [1] was kidnapped in Milan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Mustafa_Osama_Nasr

I'm a US citizen living in china, the Chinese government could seriously mess me up if they wanted to. The US government is a lot more reliable in comparison, though a bit more sinister (in the sense that the Chinese government is obvious in their disregard for rights, the US government is not).

> that can't get you easily

Who's to say that the political geography won't change in the next 50 years? Just because China doesn't have the ability to extradite _today_ doesn't mean they won't in the future.

But Baidu has none to begin with. We already know they spy and censor for the Chinese government.

I'm all for not using American services, but the Chinese ones wouldn't exactly be my first choice, as an alternative.

But what does Baidu offer that DuckDuckGo or Bing do not?

Backing by the Chinese government.

What does Baidu offer to its users / customers that DuckDuckGo or Bing do not?

Faster trials in China because the government already has all of the data it needs.

It's not an American company, that's more than enough reason for a lot of people.

True. China is an international beacon for human rights and freedom.

Well, the enemy of my enemy must be my ally... right?

Right?

> Rumours have been circulating that the Chinese search engine is developing a bike that could drive itself through packed city streets.

I will believe it when I see it.

It is kind of fun to imagine fleets of riderless bikes shuttling themselves around cities to meet demand. HubWay, CitiBike, and similar services would love that; I don't have any citation, but I would guess that manual shuttling and redistribution of bikes is a significant portion of their operating cost.

Baidu will have to go from copy cat to innovator to make this work.

Right now Baidu is missing a differentiatior that shows how it is better. Unlike T-Shirts that you can find a market for knock-offs search engines are free to the end user so you have to compete on quality, or on "default install". Baidu is missing both of those.

Although many would dismiss Baidu as a Chinese Google copycat, the fact is Baidu's founder developed his own page ranking method independently around/before the time PageRank came into existence.

Here's what Wikipedia says in its PageRank entry (Robin Li is Baidu's founder and CEO)

>A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[16] The technology in RankDex would be patented by 1999[17] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[18][19] Li's work would be referenced by some of Larry Page's U.S. patents for his Google search methods.[20]

I do not like Baidu and use Bing whenever possible (Google is too unstable in China). But again, the fact is one can dismiss Baidu for its many products but perhaps not its search.

"This article appeared in print under the headline 'China's Google' is on a roll'" ... Which was a much more appropriate headline for this article. Did they start changing their online headlines solely for the purpose of click bait?

Russia has Yandex, China has Baidu; hopefully Brazil and India will one day come with their own country's native search engine to counter-balance the West's juggernaut.

Both Yandex and Baidu are just copying Google's every move though. It's competition, but there is little innovation going on.

Isn't that pretty much the whole Chinese internet industry? At any rate, there isn't much reason to use Baidu outside of china.

It's easy to be dismissive, but the West has nothing like Alibaba: think Ebay for businesses selling to businesses. Which is why its IPO seems likely to top $20 billion.

Amazon at the consumer level is a more appropriate comparison.

Why? I don't see sellers on Alibaba advertising the number of units that they can produce per month. Aliexpress is much more like ebay if you always filtered search with "buy it now" (except that the prices are generally lower and you have to deal with longer lead times). Amazon kills it with breadth of selection and fast delivery times; I haven't seen anything out of China that compares, but the Amazon prices are higher for comparable items.

Amazon acts as a storefront for many independent merchants, just like Taobao does. This mirrors the way my wife uses amazon and Taobao, but we find Amazon to be more reliable in quality. And then there is jd.com....

Brazil's native search engine got bought by Google many years ago.

Baidu is hiring in Brazil.

Having used the Baidu Android software, it's really really nice. I'd love to see a version in English.

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