Webpages used to act as a major source from which internet users could acquire outside information, and was also a great resource helping to boost the market size for search engines. Nevertheless, confronting the competition led by news aggregators and social media platforms which poised the search function over content, the search marketing, at least in China, has seen a declining trend of user activity – young people are flowing to emerging media outlets. Baijiahao then came as a compromise to the traffic. Sponsored and encouraged by Baidu, the user-generated content platform aims to provide a quick and informative aggregator service, ending up being flooded with duplicated posts republished from other mobile applications or websites and sometimes low-quality articles with potential to harm users experience, whose content often appeared at the top of search results and received backlash. To appease the harsh critics blasting the company for prioritizing its own content, Baidu recently allowed the audience to choose whether to block search results returned by Baijiahao.
