baidu

The number 1 search is for baidu.


It will be a new term for many American. Even for me in Malaysia, with constant contact with China and Chinese, it came as a surprise too.

Baidu is a Chinese Search engine, the like of Google for English search. It started in the year of 2000. It is a large establishment serving billions of users. China alone has about 1.3 billion users and the in fact the world's largest.

It is no surprise that the CEO of Facebook was visiting the company. Currently China is filtering the internet and baidu is doing this for the government.

One of the thing that struck me is the ability of the system to search the Chinese characters. As we know, the Chinese writing originates from the pictorial images of the words. It does not have a letter like the english. A reader will have to recognize thousands of characters before he can read Chinese.

There were rumors circulating that Baidu is going to buy facebook. I don think it is true. Most likely they are working on collaboration. There millions more Chinese Speakers living in other countries. If facebook can have the chinese version, it will work wonders. Beijing headquarters of China’s largest search engine Baidu.

Let us wait and see the outcome of the visit by Facebook CEO to Baidu. Hope there will opportunities for both.