Baidu (Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù) (NASDAQ: BIDU) is the leading Chinese search engine that can search websites, audio files, and images. It also has an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia (Baidu Baike), and a searchable keyword-based discussion forums. As of September 07, 2007, it is ranked eighteen in Alexa's internet rankings. In December, 2007 Baidu became the first company from China to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index.

Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files.

Name

The name of Baidu was inspired by a Song Dynasty poem constructed in the ci form, written by Xin Qiji in the 12th century.

Services

Baidu's started with a popular feature for music search, called "MP3 Search" and its Baidu 500 is a comprehensive listing of popular Chinese music. The rankings are based on download numbers. It can locate file formats such as MP3, WMA and SWF. The multimedia search feature is mainly used in searches for Chinese pop music. While such works are copyrighted under Chinese law, Baidu is technically not breaking any laws according to their interpretations of Chinese law as stated on their Legalese page. Chinese government and industry sources stated that Baidu.com received a license from Beijing, which allows the search engine to become a fully-fledged news website.ThereforeBaidu.com will be able to give its own reports, besides showing certain results as a search engine. The company is already getting its news department ready. Baidu.com is the first Chinese search engine to receive such a license.

Baidu has started its own search engine in Japan found at www.baidu.jp.; it is the first regular service that the company provides outside of China. It includes a search bar for Web page and image searches. It also includes user help and advanced services.

The MP3 search of Baidu has been criticized by the Office of the United States Trade Representative's Special 301 report by stating that “Baidu as the largest of an estimated seven or more China-based ‘MP3 search engines' offering deep links to song files for downloads or streaming.”

See: Intellectual property in the People's Republic of China

Baidu uses the same "pay-per-click" model for advertising revenues as Google.

Censorship

In compliance with the policies of Internet censorship in China, the Chinese language version of Baidu filters controversial material from its search results. This does not apply to Baidu Japan, which drew over 60% of its traffic from within China before subsequently being blocked on the Mainland.