Baidu vs Google
As the world is moving towards a new digital global village, Search engines have become an integral part of everyday lives of the people. Google is the biggest player in the search engine business, who operates worldwide. Google offers many other services and products apart from the core web search facilities. However, Baidu is the no. 1 search engine used in China. Until January last year, Google was also available in China, but it had to operate according to the rules laid by the Chinese government. Consequently, Google moved out of China on 12 January, 2010 and now redirects all visitors on Google China (google.cn) to Google Hong Kong (google.hk). This move has further improved the revenues of Baidu, and now it holds almost three fourths of the Chinese market share.
Baidu
Baidu is a Web services company based on China. Baidu was established in January, 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and it is registered in Cayman Islands. Its headquarters are located in Beijing, China. Baidu offers a search engine based on Chinese language, among other services. The search engine can be used for searching web sites, audio and pictures. More than 700 million web pages, 80 million pictures and 10 million audio/video files (including MP3 music and movies) are indexed by Baidu. Baidu offers WPA (Wireless Application Protocol) and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) based mobile search as well. Baidu offers 57 services in total including an online wiki type encyclopedia called Baidu Baike and a discussion forum based on searchable keywords. Baidu is currently ranked 6th overall according to web traffic rankings (Alexa Internet Rankings). Baidu served more than half of the 4 billion queries in China at the end of year 2010. Baidu also features in NASDAQ and it is the first Chinese company to be included in that index.
Google is a company based in United States that provides services such as Internet search, cloud computing and advertising. Google provides many internet-based services free of charge for the users and gains revenues mainly through advertisers and sponsors through AdWords (advertising program). Two Stanford undergraduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google in 1998. It is currently headquartered in California, USA. Their initial service was the search engine, which gained rapid popularity due to the relevancy of query results and the simplicity of its interface. This popularity triggered a series of Google products such as an email service (Gmail) and social networking tools (Orkut, Google Buzz and more recently, Google+). At the moment Google is said to utilize more than one million servers and data centers all over the world. It is estimated that Google search engine processes more than one billion queries within 24 hours. Google also provides desktop applications such as Google Chrome web browser, Picasa photo organizer and Google Talk instant messaging software. Google is also the leading developer of Android operating system for phones along with their own Google Chrome OS. They also offer an optimized netbook series called Chromebooks staring from June, 2011. Main Google site (google.com) is the most visited site on the internet (according to Alexa rankings). Many other international Google sites (such as google.co.in and google.co.uk) are also in the top 100.
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What is the difference between Baidu and Google? Although, Google and Baidu are two of the popular Internet search engines, they differ in many aspects. – Google is a United States based company, while Baidu is based in China. – Google offers its services worldwide (except in China), but Baidu is available only within China and Japan. – Google offers its services in many languages, but Baidu operates in either Chinese or Japanese. – Baidu only offers internet based services, whereas Google offers various services and products including desktop applications, social networking tools and operating systems. – Although, Google officially does not operate inside China, Baidu does compete with Google Hong Kong (due to that fact that Google China visitors are redirected to Google Hong Kong).
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