It is very common to use the phrase “only in China” when we refer to something that is unlikely to happen, such as saying that nowadays Google is not the leading search engine in all countries. You might say " humm, only in China“. Well, this time you are correct. It is in China that Google ranks second as the most widely used search engine.
It sounds strange, but it is to be expected that a country with more than one billion people (1.344.130.000) will have its own search engines, this is also due to the great censorship of content applied by the Chinese government. They cannot have 100% control of a foreign system, so why not have yours for total supervision?
BAIDU (百度)
Baidu it is a number one search engine in China and number three worldwide, second only to Google and Yahoo. The name comes from the eponymous poem by Xin Qiji that was written at the time of the Song dynasty. Baidu has an index with more than 740 million pages, 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files, that is, this is content that never ends.
WHAT DO THE NUMBERS SAY
The Chinese search engine occupies the positions most desired by the big ones of the internet. According to the website Alexa Baidu ranks fifth in the top of the 5oo most popular sites in the world, second only to Google, Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo. But in China it's completely different, Baidu ranks first and Google ranks fifth, strange situation but the truth is.
WORLDWIDE
IN CHINA
As for visits, the numbers say that Yahoo went down to the third position thus leaving Baidu to move to the second position of the most visited search engines in the world, but note that these percentage data are from the last three months and are constantly changing. In this case, Google has 6.63%, Baidu has 1.76% and lastly, Yahoo 1.27%. Baidu's figures are not admirable because in China there are more than 564 million people who access the internet.
GERMANY OF SEARCHES
Baidu would not be so popular if it were just a search engine, it also has other services some similar to Google's such as Baidu Images and Baidu Video but without a doubt that one of the most interesting services besides search is Baidu Baike, One encyclopedia collaborative in Chinese. It has more articles than the famous Wikipedia, except the English version.
NO SPACE FOR GOOGLE
Google comes from a country where people are free to express themselves without censorship, but the same is not true in China. For this reason, Google was always having problems with the government and resulted in blocking access to the search system, consequently users started using a more stable system, Baidu, which is supervised by the Chinese government.
As long as China live with these censures Google will always lose to Baidu, but only in China of course.
