Baidu's internal magazine: Simple

Baidu has been doing some serious brand-building the past few years, in the minds of some observers to the detriment of its core technologies. Back in August after Baidu's big IPO, China Business Daily ran an opinion piece outlining the two avenues for further development Baidu could take with the investment it received. Would it choose to follow VP of Marketing Liang Dong's aggressive PR and promotional pushes, or would it let COO David Zhu lead its development to expand its ability to compete technologically?

IT blogger Keso recently posted some comments concerning an issue of Baidu's internal glossy newsletter, Simple that he was able to get his hands on. He points out a bit of revisionist history, a large amount of Google-chasing, and serious problems with Baidu's paid search-placement services.

To this last point, he mentions some test searches that pull up pages of "promotional" links before the real search results started somewhere around page 7 or 8. Embarrassingly, until reading his post I was one of the ignorant masses who can't tell the real results from the paid placements; while I was able to avoid the sidebar ads pretty easily, I was completely unaware that any Baidu result with a "推广" link at the end is essentially an ad.

On Friday I received an internal publication from Baidu: Simple. Its has a pretty decent cover — I quite like it. This was the inaugural issue, published in August, and it was a commemoration of Baidu's IPO. The lead piece was an short segment by Robin Li, in which he described his pride and excitement when he returned from NASDAQ. He concluded with, "As Chinese entrepreneurial citizens, we must understand the responsibility that rests on our shoulders. Baidu people can do it. This is my most simple conviction."

My feelings reading Li's cadence were not so simple. Continuing, the general editor of the magazine Liang Dong had a short piece, "The simple reflections of a word-lover." Liang said that one day a superior told him, "Change (易) is easy (容易). Only with tolerance (容) can you change." After that he immediately saw through all of the difficulties Baidu was facing: "Why can't we delete all posts in the forums that attack Baidu? Why are there over 10,000 articles in a Baidu search for the Anti-Baidu Alliance? Why can't we create content ourselves? Why are we able to set up such a powerful search alliance? Why has Baidu been hurt so many times by the slander of our opponents, yet Robin tells us to wave them aside?"

Reading up to this point, I started laughing. Comrade Liang Dong writes adorably like a middle-school student, and he speaks insincerely. Of course, as an internal publication, its basic purpose is self-promotion. In the table of contents alone, the word "Baidu" appears 21 times. Practically all of the articles in this glossy magazine, 100 pages thick (like the 百 in 百度), concern the term "simplicity," as if Baidu's roots, Baidu's DNA, could be summed up in the single word "simplicity." With this meaning in mind, it seems like Baidu is using "simplicity" to follow Google's "Don't be evil" and "Ten Things." Baidu even seems enormously proud of its simple, 4K home page with a single search field.

However, in my recollection, even Baidu's simplicity was learned from Google. The earliest Baidu homepage, found on Archive.org, is from June, 2000. This page is truly simple enough, basically the same as the homepages of other small enterprises, but at that time Baidu's slogan was "behind your e-success." It was a service company for content providers, so it did not even have a search bar. It was only in July 2002 that Baidu had a home page similar to Google's, and not until September 2002 did its home page look like it does today. But without images, it ran around 9K. Google already had this kind of simple homepage back in 1998, and in 1999 it resembled today's look, with a size of around 2K. Baidu's simplicity arrived around three to four years later. Even though Baidu has never admitted it, in many respects it has indeed copied Google.

Praising "simplicity" so highly is not necessarily a good thing for search engines. In my view, accuracy and relevance to the search request are even more important than simplicity. Searching for "transformer" (变压器), the first 77 results are "promotional" links, and for "power supply" (电源), the first 96 are "promotional" links. Simplicity is simplicity, but usefulness is pretty much absent. 56% of American search users cannot distinguish between advertising links and search results. And I think that for Baidu users, this percentage is probably even higher.

Simplicity cannot be used as a technique to bully the users, and it should not become a means to get unknowing users to mistakenly click on ads and waste the money of advertising clients. This kind of "simplicity" is little different from deception. In dealing with advertising links, I would rather that Baidu be a bit more complicated, making distinctions more evident, so as not to waste users' time or clients' money.