Baidu Building Up Social Bookmarking Service, Southern Office

By | 24 January, 2012

Chinese search giant Baidu has launched a beta of its new recommendation feature. With “thumbs up,” their users will be able to endorse search results, including webpages, news, images and multimedia files. Recommended items will be linked with users’ accounts on  the company’s social bookmarking service, Baidu Share.

Baidu has launched a new "thumbs up" recommendation feature which works with its search and social bookmarking services. (AP)

The new feature is quite similar with Facebook’s “Like” functionality, although it is also similar to how Google implements its Google+ +1 button functionality  in search results. Web developers can embed the Javascript code into their websites, which will allow visitors to share content from the website to 16 different social networking servicess, including Sohu Microblog, Renren, Kaixin001, Tencent Qzone, Pengyou Microblog, Sina Weibo, Taobao’s Tao Jianghu, and even the retired Google Buzz.

Founded in 1999 by Robin Li — who currently serves as Chairman and CEO — and Eric Xu, Baidu has likewise offered its services to several countries aside from China. Baidu in Japan, Thailand, Egypt, and India is offered in two languages: Chinese and Japanese. In addition to servicing individual internet search users, Baidu’s platform also enablesbusinesses to reach potential customers online.

Baidu is ranked fifth overall in Alexa Internet rankings and the new feature is expected to boost their statistics: 4.5 billion search queries, 58% market share, an index of over 750 million web pages, 85 million images, and 15 million multimedia files. Baidu services a total of 40 million individual users and 55 million Small  and Medium Enterprises in China.

The Beijing-based company is utilizing the new feature to increase user engagement, and to attract new users by enabling the “thumbs up” sharing to both existing and new users. With this, Baidu hopes to maintain their domination on China’s search-engine market after surpassing US-based search engine giant, Google.

As reported recently by Bloomberg, the company is also preparing for international expansion by setting up a new 220,000 square-meter international operations center in southern China, targeted to open in 2015, and intended to help gain overseas users and revenue. Robin Li, now China’s second richest man, has said that International expansion is an important way for Baidu to drive future growth.



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