Baidu should stop using paid listings

SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION about illnesses on Baidu, the most popular Chinese online search engine, you are unlikely to find any useful information on the diseases on the first one or two pages as they are full of advertisements for healthcare products. Beijing News comments:

Baidu's paid listing mechanism has come in for heavy criticism, particularly in regard to health. Two years ago, a 22-year-old man surnamed Wei from Xianyang, Shaanxi province, died at home of synovial sarcomain, a rare type of cancer, after exhausting all his families' savings in futile treatment at a "prestigious" hospital in Beijing his father had found through an advertisement on Baidu.

It turns out the hospital had rented its rooms to some private clinics, a common practice then, which the Baidu advertisement did not mention.