The first responses of Baidu and other Chinese tech companies to ChatGPT were hardly convincing. Thanks to massive investments, the gap seems to be closing. China's IT companies have fully entered the race. But the shortage of US chips remains a significant problem.
By Jörn Petring
The US company OpenAI is earning admiration for the capabilities of its artificial intelligence ChatGPT. Now, not only Google fears for its business model. Baidu is the first Chinese company to go on the offensive.
By Redaktion Table
Beijing's action against Didi appears to be just the beginning of a wider campaign to seize control of China's thriving tech sector. China's tech entrepreneurs are in for a rude awakening. Meanwhile, Washington's worries may have unfounded. The Chinese government seems to be doing everything in its power to lose its tech race with the US.
By Redaktion Table
German Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer claims that a recently passed law will make Germany "the first country in the world to put self-driving vehicles on the road." By 2022, this should be achieved. In China, however, autonomous driving cars, without safety drivers and centralized control, have been on the road since late 2020. And the gap between developments in Germany and the People's Republic is likely to widen.
By Frank Sieren
Many older Chinese feel left behind by the country's rapid digitization. China's government wants to close the "digital divide" between young and older people by 2022. This means more social integration, but also more consumption – and thus follows the logic of the 14th Five-Year Plan. For companies, at any rate, the target group of senior citizens is a long underestimated growth market.
By Frank Sieren
The Chinese company Baidu operates the search engine of the same name. It is one of the three most frequently accessed websites in the world. The Table.Media editorial team provides all relevant Baidu news.
Baidu is the largest search engine in China. It is structured and functions like its western counterpart Google. In addition to the search function, Baidu offers its users a variety of other applications such as a map service, news services, cloud computing. An overview of Baidu's services, which are comparable to Google's offerings:
Baidu Maps: Map service
Baidu News: news portal
Baidu Translate: translation tool
Baidu Baike: Wikipedia-like encyclopedia
Baidu Wenku: content sharing platform for teaching and research materials
Baidu Videos: Portal that streams Chinese movies and series for free
Baidu Zhidao: China's most popular Q&A platform
Baidu WangPan: cloud storage service
Baidu Tieba: Reddit-like online community
Baidu Tushu: search engine for books
However, the Baidu search engine is just one part of the company of the same name. Under the name iQiyi, Baidu operates a streaming service that has a cooperation with Netflix. DuerOS is an AI system. Various electrical devices can be paired with the Xiaodu smart speaker. Baidu also has a stake in Apolong with 39 other companies. A project that develops connected, driverless cars.
Baidu is not the only search engine in China. Although 71 percent of search queries go through it, there is a major competitor in Sogou (20 percent). Sogou is now a subsidiary of Tencent. The big advantage is that Sogou can be used as the only search engine within the Wechat functions. Other search engines in China such as Bing (2.5%), Haosou (1.59%) and Shenma (1.28%) only play a minor role. Google is blocked in China. The site is behind a firewall. Anyone living in China cannot google. The background is a dispute between the American search engine and the Chinese government over content censorship. Google can be accessed from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. However, not from mainland China. This gives Google a market share of 1.95 percent in China.
The Baidu search engine cannot be switched to English or German. The site basically uses Chinese. However, here users have the option to choose between a simplified (Simplified Chinese) and a traditional Chinese. Also, the search results are not suitable after entering English words. Chinese users recommend Microsoft's Bing search engine for English search queries within the People's Republic. The results displayed by Baidu are exclusively Chinese content. Content from websites whose domain does not end in .cn is not displayed by Baidu. Those who want to make their content visible on Baidu must also do without a large number of censored terms.
Robin Li founded the search engine Baidu together with Eric Xu in 2000. The duo chose a panda paw as the logo for Baidu. Li had already developed the Rankdex algorithm that year. The basis for the later search engine Baidu. The software evaluated the quality and thus relevance of pages according to the number of hyperlinks that lead to the pages. A technology that Larry Page also referred to when he founded Google. Literally, Baidu means "hundreds of times."The name of the search engine refers to the poem "Green Jade Table at the Festival of Lights." It is by poet Xin Qiji, who worked in the Song Dynasty about 800 years ago. In the poem, the search for a beauty that retreats in chaos is compared to the search for dreams. The Baidu poem, from which the name of the Chinese search engine is derived: "Hundreds of thousands of times, I searched for her in the chaos. Suddenly, I happened to turn to where the lights were fading, and there she stood."
In 2001, Robin Li enabled companies to buy advertising space on Baidu. The amount paid was tied to the amount of clicks. It was a business model that Google would quickly adopt. In 2003, a special search function for images and news articles followed. The special feature was that the algorithm was able to identify similar images and news and group them for the user. Baidu has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since August 2005. The search engine was so successful that it was included in the NASDAQ-100 Index just two years later. As the first Chinese company ever. Continuous growth made founder Robin Li a multi-billionaire. In 2021, his fortune will be around 10.9 billion dollars.
The company Baidu and the Chinese Communist Party are criticized worldwide because the search results are heavily censored. This is despite the fact that website creators have already been censored. For certain topics, Baidu does not display any search results, or none at all. But the censorship can also be useful. The government of the People's Republic had instructed Baidu to cover sensitive images with blank tiles in its map service Baidu Maps. This was to keep certain buildings secret. Mostly military bases, prisons, power plants and internment camps of Uyghurs. In order to discover the camps, journalists focused on the areas that Baidu had censored when evaluating the areas. About 315 internment camps were uncovered in this way.
The influence of search engines on society, economy and democracy is enormous. All Baidu News and latest topics on Robin Li is provided by the Table.Media editorial team.
