According to reports, the companies are trying to protect website users who have created personal profiles and blogs. These profiles, many of which were created for private audiences, can be crawled by search engines and the information contained on these pages can end up among search engine results.
While these portals and social networks assert their decision to block Baidu is based on users’ rights to privacy, analysts say much of their motivation comes from dissatisfaction at Baidu’s domineering web presence. Just this week, Baidu, which claims 60 per cent of China’s search market share, announced beta tests of its e-commerce site that the company hopes will directly rival market powerhouse Alibaba.
E-commerce auction site Taobao.com, a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group, reportedly moved to block searches conducted by Baidu earlierthis week, as well as partially block searches by Google and Yahoo, in order to protect Alibaba users from being approached by illegal vendors.
“I find this excuse a real stretch. Since when has anybody worried about user privacy in China before? What guidelines do they use for protecting user privacy?” asked Paul Denlinger, owner of China Business Strategy. “This sounds much more like a desire to dial back the power of Baidu and its search.”
Jason Kuperman, regional vice-president of digital development at Omnicom Group, added that, if social networks did not have further motive against Baidu, they could easily have implemented privacy protection measures on their sites instead of blocking the engine.
“I know Facebook allows you to have a specific profile which appears just for searches. That seems like a better solution than actually blocking any search engines,” he said.
Even with its dominant position in China’s search market, the pressure from the host of websites aligned against Baidu may be enough to elicit a strategy change before a distant search rival narrows its lead.
“My guess is that Baidu may put forth some privacy protection guidelines for the industry to discuss, and invite all other players to participate in the discussion,” Denlinger said.
Representatives from Baidu could not be reached for comment.
