Baidu’s aggressive monetization march eventually elicited a backlash. Yesterday, a viral post circulating on the Chinese internet lashed out at search results provided by Baidu mostly dominated by its own properties, which includes feeds from the content aggregating service Baijiahao, Q&A platform Zhidao, discuss forum Tieba and Wikipedia’s likeness Baike, etc., while most of which are seen as low-quality. Baidu’s response in an official statement clarifies that articles from Baijiahao account for approximately 10% of its search results, and “will continue to court quality media outlets and creators and use positive mechanisms to encourage authors to spread high-quality original content“.
