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Baidu : A Chinese Search Engine Provider

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Introduction
Baidu is a Chinese web services company that mainly offers Chinese language search engine for websites, music and images. Baidu also offers other services such as Baidu Baike which is similar to Wikipedia, Baidu Maps, etc. Baidu was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and now the company’s headquarters is located in Beijing.
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1. Why is Baidu number one in its industry? Where is its competitive advantage?
As a Chinese search engine provider, Baidu is almost unrivaled compared to its competitors such as 360 search, Sogou search, Google China, Yahoo China.

As can be seen at Figure 1, Baidu owns 85.9% of the Chinese Search Engine Market Share. Even the world’s leading search engine provider Google could not compete with Baidu in the Chinese market. Especially during the attempt of cyber attack on Google at 2010 (Yousuf, 2010) to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists, which has led Google to decide that they would no longer censor results on google.cn such as pornography or references to topics such as the Taiwanese independence, the Dalai Lama and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and redirect all the searches to a Google Hong Kong. This allowed Google to avoid the strict censorship rules that Baidu and others in China must follow, while also putting it at a major disadvantage in the huge Chinese market (Einhorn & Stone, 2010). Moreover in 2012 when the Chinese

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