Finally, Baidu is launching its patent search services in China that called Baidu Zhuanli. In my previous post, I’ve briefly introduced this service, that is a joint-product cooperated with the SIPO, State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.C.

When you type some keywords to this patent search engine, the relevant results will appeared on the Baidu page. Click on any hyperlink on the page will bring you to the patent (in Chinese), however in contrast to Google’s Patent Search, Baidu Zhuanli does not offer any document related to the patent that can be viewed in PDF format. You will only get a brief information about the patent and is meant to be barely viewed through a browser interface, such as patent number, filing date, issue date, inventor, inventor’s address, and patent classified number, as shown in the below picture.

In response to the needs of the potential users, Baidu Patent Search is integrated with a whopping patent database which amounted to 2.7 million of China’s patents.

Source: available at http://zhuanli.baidu.com/pages/sipo/9511/93/18b6ff719e8e8159c0bbfaf7edd3d5f4_0.html, accessed 29 December 2007

Hot on the heels of statistical data search, comes another search service. Baidu will release what could be an interesting search service in next year, i.e. January 1, 2008, called the Baidu Patent Search. It’s a product that jointly cooperated with the SIPO, State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.C. However, the details of which domain Baidu would used and how many patent documents that Baidu going to index to its search engine were not disclosed at this moment.

This search service will most likely to be the first patent search engine that available in Chinese. It’s a good idea, especially for users that want to find a better way in research a patented technology that happened in China.

Baidu has added a new feature which is video uploading service in its online community site, that known as Baidu Tieba. Baidu Tieba, dubbed as the world’s biggest Chinese online community was doing some great works to serve its users in the past, most recently it allowed users to upload pictures, and now it allowed users to upload their videos to the site.

Since the online community platform is very crowded in recent years, it is inevitably that Baidu is working on to improve the existing functionality of this Tieba. Each users that signed up to this site will have an online storage space of 20G, with the maximum file size of video that entitled to 200MB, and the video file format can be uploaded are varied, that include wmv, asf, asx, rm, rmvb, mpg, mpeg, mov, avi, dat and etc. Title of the video is entitled to 15 Chinese character, and tagging of the video is also allowed in this Baidu Tieba.

According to iResearch, Baidu still maintain its dominant position in China’s search engine market, with the market share of 60.8% in third quarter of 2007, while Google China is slowly increasing, captured 23.8% and another player, i.e. Yahoo! China gained 10.4%, achieved more than 300% growth compared to its performance in fourth quarter of year 2006. A pie chart illustrated the above market share is in the below.

In overall, the search engine market of China is growing, amounted to 818 million Chinese Yuan. This amount record a 27.6% increase compared with second quarter of 2007 and a 110.3% increase over the same quarter of the prior year.

Green color: Baidu
Yellow color: Google China
Blue color: Yahoo! China

Source: available at http://it.hexun.com/2007-11-30/101897320.html, accessed 1 December 2007

Hot on the heels of the brand advertising program come another one, the statistical data search. This is Baidu’s second attempt in a week to widen their reach in the China’s search engine market. The statistical data search that offered by Baidu, will enable an user to search whatever statistics available on the Web that indexed by Baidu. However, as I tried the service, not every keyword will return result, I tried 网民, i.e. Internet surfers, it returns nothing. On the contrary, while I type some keywords such as 爱情, i.e. love, 银行, i.e. bank, and 职业, i.e. occupation, several results appeared especially for the hot keyword “职业”, i.e. occupation.

Some said successful companies have built their very businesses on their ability to collect, analyze as well as act on data. With the introduce of Baidu Statistical Data Search, we now can see some market data of China through this service without any charge, as a young man who like to read research reports, I particularly find this service extremely useful for me.

Source: available at http://tjsj.baidu.com/pages/jxyd/20/37/90ffc86ca2be8d208a0b3e4d5aa2cda5_0.html, accessed 29 November, 2007.

Baidu has launched a new advertising program to serve the big corporate clients in China. This new program is Baidu’s latest attempt to maintain its China’s market share and acted as a permanent marketing strategy to tout several China well-known players to use Baidu’s search services. Currently, there are two companies that joined this program which are Gome, China’s largest electrical appliances retailer and China Construction Bank. These two companies are given privilege to be appeared at top of the search results page when an user type “国美”, i.e. Gome and “建行”, i.e. China Construction bank. Visually, logo is shown and the links to few subdomains of these companies are provided in a separate section of the page, as shown in the below picture.

It seems that brand advertising is the fastest growing segment of search on the Web today and Baidu is on its way to monetize this market.

Example 1: When I type 国美 in Baidu search engine

Example 2: When I type 建行 in Baidu search engine

This July, I posted a post on Baidu Tongji, the Web analytics tool developed by Baidu, now it has opened to the community of Baidu Union. Unlike any other analytics tool that can be found on the Web, Baidu Tongji is designed for the internal use of its Baidu Union members. The available of Baidu Tongji allowed the Baidu Union members get a practical insight on what happened to their sites, thus increasing the business value of the sites’ investment. However, the registered members must copy and paste the given tracking code (cookies) from Baidu Tongji onto their sites to enable the visitors tracking, and the tracking will begin after approx. one hour. The report of this Baidu Tongji will show the page view, unique IP, number of visitors, number of new visitors, repeat visitors, referrals, keyword comparison and etc of a given member’s site.

It seems the launched of this Baidu Tongji is Baidu’s plan to tightly integrate the analytics tool with Web sites that used Baidu advertisements. And hopefully the Web sites holders can take the action from the report or insight gained therein. To provide insight that one Baidu Union member can use to improve her Web site will in turn help growing the Baidu advertisement market in China.

Baidu is at the critical point in this year. They have announced to build one of the biggest C2C (consumer-to-consumer) online trading platform, based on its search technologies. This move represented Baidu’s ambition to enter e-commerce market, resolve around the proposal that a search engine giant should diversify into several other areas and maximize the profits. While, they have established a strong market in China and the Chinese speaking community, this move is make a lot sense but C2C market doesn’t seem to be right choice for them. C2C market in China faced several obstacles, such as the problem of online payment, Chinese consumers’ habits, poor logistics systems, just to name a few. I wonder how they going to overcome all these obstacles and emerge as a new giant in C2C field as they had envisioned?

In the meantime, I also expect the IM product, still in Baidu’s lab will launch to the market shortly.