Chinese search giant Baidu has long been criticized by China Central Television and its rival Google for its so-called “Baidu Bidding Ranking program.” Reports also say that some competitors of Baidu have even filed a lawsuit in the local court to get a justified answer.

To this issue, Baidu had to say that it has closed all the bidding rank campaign due to some quarrel generating keywords. It has also strengthened its governing policies regarding Bidding Ranking program. Now, more remedial measures are expected to be carried out in order to regain Baidu’s high public recognition.

China Central Television said that Baidu wants money only and takes little care about paying attention on checking the legal status of all the bidding ranking advertisers.

Now the question arises, “Will the Baidu issue influence general public to look for an alternative search engine?” However, if Google can catch up the issue, this is nothing at all. But reports say that, Google can not catch up with Baidu for the next one or two years, as it doesn’t have any idea of market as well as what Baidu is all about.

According to Sterne Agee & Leach analyst James Lee “there might be some consumers, who found their way to unlicensed private clinics and other health centers by finding their ads, when searched for health related topics on Baidu.”
E-commerce times said that such damage to Baidu’s reputation can provide more strengthening opportunities to Google because Chinese consumers will now view Baidu’s search results less pure than Google.

However a report stated that, Baidu was not actually doing anything illegal. In China, there are no such laws which can prevent the search engine from accepting ads from such organizations. Moreover, Baidu doesn’t even have the responsibility to find out the legitimate nature of these organizations.

These recent claims have had bad effect on Baidu’s stock as well. CEO of Baidu, Mr. Ronin Li has promised to take action against the matter. He said that Baidu has removed the keywords for all the four clients named in the report. Of late, Baidu is checking the licenses of all the hospitals and pharmaceutical companies listed in its website.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 am and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.