As Stefan writes in his blog, Online Marketing in China. SEO, “the basic difference between [Google and Baidu] is that Baidu has more uneducated users who live in rural areas and/or are students. The latter is preferred by white-collar workers, decision makers, scholars, etc. Those with a need for good quality search results.” He draws an inference from a recent piece of news. From Media,
According to an Alibaba spokeswoman, Alibaba issued the termination letter to Baidu on 10 October and ads will stop running on the search engine’s sites before 10 November.
[…]“We monitor the effectiveness of our search advertising on an ongoing basis and we no longer believe that Baidu makes business sense for us as a marketing platform,” she continued. “The effectiveness of our search advertisements on Baidu has been decreasing and click fraud rates are on the rise.”
Yet, while Alibaba will cease advertising on Baidu, it may work with Baidu’s competitors Google and Yahoo in the future because the sites are capable of attracting “high-quality traffic for Alibaba.com,” the spokeswoman said.
Referring to a report Stefan made in 2007,
The better educated users are, the more they rely on Google.
The older they are (and the more disposable income they have), the more they use Google.
There is no difference among female and male test users.More findings were:
The more a user users search engines, the more he likes Google.
Negative points for Google are the instability of Google’s website, having no page-caching and no free MP3 and other media search functionality.
Negative points for Baidu are that search results are mixed with paid search results and that no content from Chinese pages abroad is included. That search results are filtered according to governmental requirements is a negative factor as well, according to the study.
The report draws a nice comparison between Google and Baidu’s paid search programs and also provides some interesting figures. For more details, visit the original post.
Also, for Baidu and Alibaba’s earlier e-commerce conflict, see the CDT post, “Sites Battle for Chinese Web Users.”
