Word: baidu
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...acquire the company and shift its focus. (Yes, the Mouse House could have been Google before Google.) So in 1999, he and a friend did what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do: they raised $1.2 million in venture capital, added another $10 million to that the next year, and started up Baidu back home in Beijing. (Read "Google and China: Silicon Valley Is No Longer King...
...than $100 million in the process. It was by far the most successful Internet IPO since the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. One of its earliest investors, in fact, was Google - before the company entered the China market in 2006. It paid $5 million for a 2.6% stake in Baidu in 2004. But Google sold its stake in Baidu for about $60 million two years later, and entered the search business in China on its own. It was game...
...Baidu got traction in its home market by focusing its search engine on China-centric information. "Initially, we were better [than Google] on stuff a Chinese Internet user would search for," says one insider. "They've since closed that gap somewhat, but that emphasis early helped us get and maintain our lead.'' Baidu has also introduced a question-and-answer service called "Baidu Knows," which is a hit. And the company just won a big legal battle when a popular music-download function it offers was cleared of copyright infringement by a Beijing court. The complaint had been brought against...
...Critics say that Baidu has won favor with the government through its rigorous self-censorship. (Punch in "Tiananmen Square 1989" and you'll mostly get results about security arrangements for the 2008 Olympics and last year's celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, with only a few sanitized references to the student demonstrations.) Authorities have certainly scrutinized and disrupted Google's China operations far more frequently than Baidu's (one former Google employee calls it "operational harassment"). But it's not at all clear that it made much of a difference...
...There have been times, in fact, when the Chinese government, in the form of its state-owned media, has turned on Baidu. In 2008, CCTV, the powerful state-run television network, aired reports on the site's habit of serving up unlicensed doctors and illegal pharmacies in response to medical queries on its engine. It turned out those were Baidu advertisers. The disclosures hit directly at the site's integrity and temporarily crushed the stock. Baidu has only just finished rolling out a new program that will delineate paid results from general searches, but that remedy has taken more time...