Baidu digging a grave for itself

ON TUESDAY a post with the headline "Baidu as a search engine is dead already" created a buzz on social media, as it blamed the Chinese-language search giant for artificially controlling the search results so that articles from its own affiliated website Baijiahao appear among the first listings. China Daily writer Zhang Zhouxiang comments:

By Wednesday, the topic "Baidu is dead" had already been read 79 million times on micro blog, China's equivalent to Twitter. Of the about 9,000 comments on the issue, more than 8,000 said they faced similar problems when using Baidu to search something. Some even said the first three pages are full of useless information from Baijiahao that they have to spend a lot of time and energy to find their really needed results.

Baidu responded that articles from Baijiahao account for less than 10 percent of the total search results. Later, its Chief Executive Officer Shen Ke said the company does not regret what it has done, and said it is helping to make the internet better.