Baidu is on a mission to take over the world, but seriously, who isn’t? There’s only a couple markets in the world where Google is present, but not dominant and they include China, South Korea, and Russia. Actually it should be surprising to learn that Google actually lost a seven percent market share to Baidu last month.
It’s also interesting to note that Baidu and Google share many of the same web services such as a browser, an Android-base operating system, news, internet TV, and maps.
Baidu’s Director of International Communications Kaiser Kuo granted an interview to CNN a couple of years ago and he explained some of the initial success of Baidu:
‘You probably remember that early on there were surveys that showed that most Chinese internet users simply couldn’t spell the word Google to type it into their browser.”
“Baidu has really always anticipated the use [and] needs of the chinese internet user and done it very well.”
“…We are still very much focused on the Chinese market.”
Despite this focus, Kuo explains that he sees a bright future for the search engine and expects it to expand and grow in the years to come.
He explains further:
“We’ve never made a secret of the fact that we intend to become a global brand,”
It seems that Kuo now has some evidence to support his claims as Baidu has experienced an almost 80% profit growth when looking at the last quarter of 2011, as compared with the same time the year before.
Baidu is an organization to keep an eye on. Perhaps they will overtake Google in the future or even better yet, they will some how be affiliated with each other. I’ll try to stay up to date on what they’re doing.