Google exited the Chinese market in 2010. For a primary schooler as I was at that time, if it was not for I am studying outside of the country, I would have the same vague memories about Google. These memories are either from the heated TV series back in the days with the catchphrase ‘Foreign things for Google; Domestic things for Baidu; Awkard things for Tianya.’ Google is the major search engine of the world now, and Baidu has taken over the entire Chinese market, while Tianya, originally as a chatting forum, had its own function got annexed by Baidu already.
I started to use Bing long time ago, even if the search content inside and outside of mainland China is different, it is still convinient to use. The region of the search engine switch automatically depending on your geographical location, which means no need to turn on and grin and bear the constantly malfunctioning VPN anymore.
One of the reasons why I stopped using Baidu was, that this is a really nasty search engine. With Google’s exit, Baidu took over the 70% share of the Chinese search engine. Baidu adopted the SEM as its method of searching. Simply put, advertisers pay the search engine to be ranked on top when users search for relevant content. For example, when you are based in Beijing, trying to look for ‘iPhone’, the top result might appear to be ‘Beijing + iPhone + discount’. How do we arrive at this point? Algorithm plays a part, of course, the marketing group behind the search engine also plays a huge part. Retailers bid for the position to post their ads at the top search results, (I assume no one would carefully read the content after 5 pages of the result.)
Google uses the SEM with careful supervision. A decent amount of ads are okay and most of the users are capable of telling the difference between the eye-catching ads and the truth.
However, Baidu messed it up.
Baidu gained a lot of illegal benefits from creating ads with misleading and false content, from cheap health products to medications critical to diseases. All these cases accumulated day by day, and with a trigger, there was finally a burst out — The Case of Wei Zexi.
Wei was an undergraduate at a famous university in China. He was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his second year at the university, in 2012. The chances of being cured by normal treatment were too remote. Therefore, Wei and his family turned to Baidu for help. According to the webpage of ‘Beijing Biological Treatment Center’, being cured was fully guaranteed, and Wei was convinced by all the propaganda, advertisements, and the center’s reputation, so he switched to this center for treatment and stopped the radiotherapy.
Unfortunately, cancer cells have metastasized to the lungs, and soon Wei passed away.
Before his death, Wei posted a lot of comments on Zhihu, a platform similar to Quora. Users eventually found out that the so-called ‘Beijing Biological Treatment Center’ was in actuality an unqualified personal clinic. Most of these kinds of clinics were run by people from Putian, so the clinics are referred to as Putian Hospitals, too. Putian Hospital, taking advantage of the SEM, had themselves being stuck on the top of the search results, which led to the tragedy of Wei.
There was another thing that Baidu did that alarmed the entire country. Baidu Tieba, a forum similar to Reddit and part of Baidu’s business, had a lot of channels under which patients of the same disease could exchange their opinions. However, one day, members of these channels found out that the hosts of channels were changed. It turned out that Baidu sold the positions to so-called professionals or commercial use…
Chinese live in a world without Google, Facebook, or Instagram, WhatsApp… Throughout the years, we developed our environment of the World Brain… if without VPN.
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