Baidu --A Chinese and Japanese search engine

Baidu is a Chinese and Japanese search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu was established in 2000 by co-founders, Robin Li and Eric Xu. Both of the co-founders are Chinese nationals who have studied and worked overseas before returning to China. Baidu.com Inc. is registered in the Cayman Islands.In April 2010, Baidu ranked 7th overall in Alexa's internet rankings. In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index.

The NASDAQ-100 is a stock market index of 100 of the largest non-financial companies listed on the NASDAQ. It is a modified market value-weighted index. The companies' weights in the index are based on their market capitalizations, with certain rules capping the influence of the largest components. It does not contain financial companies, and includes companies incorporated outside the United States. Both of those factors differentiate it from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the exclusion of financial companies distinguishes it from the S&P 500 Index.

Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu offers multi-media content including MP3 music and movies, and is the first in China to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search.

On 12 January 2010, Baidu.com's DNS records in the United States were altered such that browsers to baidu.com were redirected to a website purporting to be the Iranian Cyber Army, thought to be behind the attack on Twitter during the 2009 Iranian election protests, making the actual site unusable for four hours. Internet users were met with a page saying "This site has been attacked by Iranian Cyber Army". Chinese hackers later responded by attacking Iranian websites and leaving messages. Baidu later launched legal action against Register.com for gross negligence after it was revealed that Register.com's technical support staff changed the email address for Baidu.com on the request of an unnamed individual, despite their failing security verification procedures. Once the address had been changed, the individual was able to use the forgotten password feature to have Baidu's domain passwords sent directly to them, allowing them to pull off the Domain hijacking .

Baidu competes with Yahoo! China, Microsoft's Bing and MSN Messenger, Sina, Sohu's Sogou, Wikipedia, NetEase's Youdao, Tencent's Soso.com and PaiPai, Alibaba’s Taobao, TOM Online, Xunlei's Gougou and EachNet.

Baidu is the No. 1 search engine in China, controlling 63 percent of China's market share as of January 2010, according to iResearch. The number of Internet users in China rose to 338 million by the end of June 2009, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center.

Posted in: Technical