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Baidu's CEO Declares He Can Beat Google Again
- ulfw 8y agoI mean seriously, what else would any CEO say? 'Sorry, we give up. I instructed our board to shut down the company?'
- edwinj99 8y agowho knew it wont be that hard to crush your competition when you have the backing of your authoritarian government.
- tehlike 8y agoIt is funny coming from them though. Well, bad news for them, united states is a leader in tech for a reason. I dont believe china can replicate that success, they will only clone. It is fine to trash talk, we know who wins in such situation.
- Apfel 8y agoAs I've said in another thread, anyone who's used Baidu for any length of time should laugh out loud at the suggestion that it's anywhere close to Google in quality.
- shanghaiaway 8y agoBaidu search results are much, much better than Googles.
- spacehunt 8y agoReally? For example, I tried looking up a 生煎包 place nearby for dinner just now: https://m.baidu.com/from=844b/s?word=%E9%8A%85%E9%91%BC%E7%81%A3+%E7%94%9F%E7%85%8E%E5%8C%85 https://m.baidu.com/from=844b/s?word=%E9%8A%85%E9%91%BC%E7%8... The first pages results are all irrelevant. Compare to Google's: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E9%8A%85%E9%91%BC%E7%81%A3+%E7%94%9F%E7%85%8E%E5%8C%85 https://www.google.com/search?q=%E9%8A%85%E9%91%BC%E7%81%A3+... The very first result is actually where I would want to go, and there's a map right there to direct me to the place.
- yorwba 8y agoI think the problem is that Baidu doesn't recognize 銅鑼灣 as a location. Maybe they just didn't bother to get good map data for Hong Kong. Trying https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E4%B8%9C%E7%9B%B4%E9%97%A8%20%E7%94%9F%E7%85%8E%E5%8C%85 https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E4%B8%9C%E7%9B... instead, I do get a result with a map, although it's not the first and the first result is a different place.
- spacehunt 8y agoBaidu actually does recognize 銅鑼灣 as a location and even suggests other places in Hong Kong (旺角、南丫岛 etc, incidentally in Simplified Chinese instead.) The results just weren't good. Actually I didn't get a map even with your link. Perhaps it's because I'm not in mainland China? It shows up like this: https://imgur.com/vCa07JM https://imgur.com/vCa07JM My search's Google results look like this: https://imgur.com/di147uj https://imgur.com/di147uj
- tehlike 8y agoGoogle is not just search, that is the kicker.
- tehlike 8y agoYup, but what do we expect him to say anyway, that he'd lose to google? Investors would dump it right away. Similar to how xi is talking when it comes to trade wars, baidu behaves the same.
- _wmd 8y agoare we talking about Google or Baidu here?
- fastball 8y agoGoogle has the backing of the US Government?
- rapsey 8y agoAnyone thinking they don't are incredibly naive. It won't help them in the Chinese market obviously.
- c3534l 8y agoLast I checked it was still legal to use Baidu in America, which can't be said for Google in China. Please tell me how you think they're comparable, because I guess I am one of those "incredibly naive" people.
- chvid 8y agoI betcha if Baidu were to get any significant traffic from the US it would be a different story.
- jtrip 8y agoCan you do a little better than a 'betcha'? A few pertinent examples of America interfering on behalf of mega-corps would do. I know they are there out there, but I can't recall them right now.
- chvid 8y agoI think the "ban" of Huawei gives some hints on what might happen. Of course it would look different since the "customers" here are private citizens rather than corporations.
- ddorian43 8y agoBaidu has some (nice?) open source packages(google stack clone), like tera (bigtable clone), bfs (hdfs clone) etc. Anybody tried using them ?
- bitxbit 8y agoYou know “open source” has a very different meaning in China.
- gonvaled 8y agoCould you clarify?
- gbraad 8y agoIn China there exist several different terms. But hey, do most people even know the difference between Free Software and Open Source? It depends really on who you talk to; lets say a manager mostly will look at a cost perspective, while a software engineer might see benefits for integration, and even then mostly driven by the fact it is easily available, and perhaps even only consuming it. this is can also be different for most other places; Europe is more idealistic in the approach than America/US. Note: European; Now I live in Beijing/China, help projects with consultancy for open source, did this for many years for companies... and now work for Red Hat.
- mozey 8y ago“We can now, with real knives and real guns, PK them again, win again,” I read that as poesklap!
- baybal2 8y agoKnowing what a country it is, this might not be an innuendo :)
- matdehaast 8y agoHaha there are some things that are just so much better in Afrikaans!
- NicoJuicy 8y agoIt's really weird when you are speaking Dutch natively
- RikNieu 8y agoDis 'n woord wat ek nooit gedink het ek sal ooit op HN lees nie...
- NicoJuicy 8y agoDutch: Dat woord had ik nooit verwacht om op HN te lezen
- hoektoe 8y agoLekke afrikaans
- dna_polymerase 8y ago> The world is copying from China Sure. Ask any customs officer. Like it or not, the free markets in the United States created the greatest technological advances of mankind. China has nothing on that. Some lousy chip makers and cheap labour won't be able to compete with anything done in the US. Also if Baidu was so great, try competing in the US or on neutral ground like Europe.
- laumars 8y agoThe free market in the US has created the biggest corporations known to mankind. However a drive to monopolise an industry doesn't necessarily equate to technological advancement. In fact often it can lead to the opposite effect where there is a lack of motivation to innovate once market penetration reaches a certain threshold. The ironic thing is the free market in the US seems to be a one way street. There's a push for deregulation whenever it allows corporations to behave with moral ambiguity. However corporations often love legislation if it raises the barrier for entry for new start ups wishing to compete. But going back to your original point, there have been plenty of great technological advances from China and Europe. Easily more than enough to dismiss your insinuation that the US has a monopoly on technological advancement, let alone the wider point regarding free markets.
- bitxbit 8y agoThat’s bullshit. We have insanely large US corporations precisely because RoW didn’t innovate. They (US-based tech) simply make better products.
- laumars 8y agoSize doesn't equate to quality though. eg even when Microsoft was at it's peak it's fair to say they didn't keep pace with innovation (aside finding new ways for their software to hog memory and CPU). All too often it takes an underdog to shake things up. However what the size of US corporations does prove is that the American system is better for building dominating businesses. But I'd already said that in my previous post.
- 8y ago
- EZ-E 8y agoHe can and did beat Google because the Chinese government has and will never let Google succeed in its domestic market against the local champions
- gonvaled 8y agoWhich, to be fair, seeing how this megacorporations are behaving (data, taxes, ...) makes a lot of sense.
- PhDuck 8y agoHow does it "make sense"? Are you implying that the local company will behave more ethically? Baidu is also a mega corporation, that will surely allow the government access to your data at a whim. Right now, it is merely stifling competition leaving the users without choice.
- jeffbax 8y agoTo the Chinese government that's a feature, not a bug. This will be very interesting to watch whether Google's able to overcome severe hometown advantage in a way most companies aren't with the possible exception of Apple and maybe Microsoft?
- gonvaled 8y agoIt will for sure comply with local tax rules, unless it is doing something illegal. As it stands, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, ... do not pay adequate tax rates in the EU. If we had local companies, we would not lose billions in tax revenues thanks to tax loopholes created by the US government, to benefit US corporations. Regarding data management: will that be any worse compared to what the big five are doing? From the cuntry's point of view (and its citizens, one would assume), is it better that your government is spying or you, or that foreign corporations / governments are spying on you? Put another way: are you more worried (as US citizen I assume) that the NSA / FBI are spying on you, or that the russians / chinese are spying on you?
- knorker 8y agoAll you people saying all governments favour local companies are, in my opinion, completely delusional. Counter-evidence one: Google is #1 in Europe. That's sufficient to squash your point. But also: You seem to have no idea what China is like. Foreign companies will get government-supported mobs to break into your office and trash the place, during daylight hours for hours, and the police will refuse to show up. The best you can do is call the police and say "this mob slamming at the doors make me fear for my life. If you don't get me out of here I'll call my embassy and say there's a hostage situation". Suddenly the… no the police doesn't show up… the police tell you that the mob will disappear soon, and you have 5 minutes to leave before they come back.
- shanghaiaway 8y agoSource
- bepotts 8y agoPeople say "governments favour local companies" to defend the EU's ridiculous anti-trust claims against US tech, and to attack America for not breaking up American tech monopolies. Apparently America is propping up all its tech companies and it's not allowing European companies to compete, thus is similar to CCP's support of Chinese tech companies; which is of course ridiculous for all the things you just mentioned. The constant drum beat of "America is morally wrong for not using anti-trust on its tech companies" is just ridiculous. Especially when trying to compare the US government's approach to the free market to China's.
- nrow 8y agoHow is the EU's anti-trust claims ridiculous? Apple, and Google (and probably more companies), made special deals with Ireland and Luxembourg to pay something like <5% VAT and <5% corporate tax, while everyone else were paying >20% and >20%. And those deals largely isn't available to EU companies because they can't use the favorable US tax laws to do it. Despite Android being open source Google forced manufacturers to not sell any other versions of it if they also wanted to sell Googles. Which of course would be disastrous for any company. Enforcement against that is only ridiculous if you don't like competition.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoThing is 86% of people in a recent China poll indicated they would use Google instead of Baidu. Baidu has the market share but not the love of their users. https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo-google-china https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo-google-...
- JohnTHaller 8y agoIt's worth noting that Baidu having a global presence allows the Chinese government to use it to attack their cyber enemies, so China has a vested interest in growing Baidu. Last time, China used the Great Firewall to weaponize Baidu's analytics worldwide for the largest DDoS in history against github in 2015 because github hosted two projects that allowed Chinese citizens to get around the Great Firewall and read the New York Times uncensored.