ft.com/techblog

Beijing: With Google trailing far behind in Chinese internet search, Nasdaq-listed market-leader Baidu.com has been putting the boot in with a video commercial that mocks foolish foreigners’ ignorance about China. The spot, (available on Google’s own YouTube here ), features a local hero who crashes a wedding between a top-hatted Caucasian and his Chinese fiancée, woos the bride-to-be away, and leaves the foreigner vomitting up what looks like blood.

"I know you don’t know I know…you don’t know I know you don’t know," the Chinese scholar hero tells him in what is intended to be a demonstration of the importance of local linguistic understanding.

Google might be forgiven for feeling Baidu is being a bit ungrateful, given that Beijing-based company owes its business model and the ideas behind most of its services to its US rival (a lookalike video search function is expected next week). And it’s far from clear that Baidu’s success is purely the result of Chinese acumen - it has hardly been hurt by government disruption of Google’s uncensored international service.

Indeed, Sergey Brin, Google’s president of technology, said last week the Communist government’s efforts to "purify" the internet could be largely driven by protectionism, saying: "I think a lot of these challenges and policing may be side effects of lobbying by local competitors there”. (See the FT story).

One of the taglines to the advert - "(Baidu) conforms to Chinese customs" - may be a veiled dig at the very public soul-searching Google went through before launching its censored domestic Chinese service. Baidu, by contrast, is happy to restrict access through its services to information that might upset the government. That policy is perfectly understandable from a business point of view, but it does mean - to misquote the advert - that there are lots of things Chinese users of its heavily censored searches "don’t know they don’t know".

February 2nd, 2007 in Asia, Internet | Permalink