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Did anyone else here grow up being told that the Chinese government stole search technology from Google when they tried to do business there, and this is how Ba
by equalunique 9y ago
Did anyone else here grow up being told that the Chinese government stole search technology from Google when they tried to do business there, and this is how Baidu got started?
- kercker 9y agoOnce www.people.cn (the website of People's Daily) built a search engine and failed. If Chinese government stole search technology from Google, why would it give it to Baidu not to a search engine set up by its mouthpiece? Baidu had already been popular in China before Google officially entered China, so there is no 'this is how Baidu got started' thing.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoNo idea if they stole anything and I wouldn't/couldn't/won't make any claims about that etc. but what I've seen of Baidu's open sourced offerings, they are based on Google's publically promoted/published designs down to the types of components (their own implementations of protobuf RPC, GFS, etc.), class names, API C++ style, etc. Lots of others have done this (some parts of Facebook, too) and I don't think this was based on Google source code or anything, but it doesn't exactly smell terribly innovative on its own?
- adventured 9y agoNo, that's an abnormal and rare accusation in fact. Robin Li was working in the US on search before Google existed. That includes at IDD and Infoseek. Circa 1999-2000, if you understood how PageRank worked (along with some other similar approaches), combined with some funding, talented engineers, and Li's background in search, it would not have been necessary to steal technology from Google to found something like Baidu.