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Baidu hijacking traffic from Major Search Engine ?

By Reaper-X on Oct 19, 2007 in Internet

Baidu According to comments posted at techcrunch, it seems that some people also experiencing the same redirect problem, while some other don’t … although this comment posted by Serge looks interesting :

I lived in China (Beijing) for quite awhile and hosted my own dedicated servers at China Netcom data center.

Here is the story with Baidu:

It has a partnership with both China Netcom and China Telecom to redirect all invalid (or blocked) dns entries to baidu. In practice that’s how Baidu gets all of its users. What you see is probably not the change that Baidu made but a recent blocking of Google Blogsearch in China – and yes, this affects the whole mainland China (since China Netcom covers north and educational networks, while Telecom covers the rest).

As a note, Danny Sullivan also wrote about this issue too

While i know that Baidu is the #1 search engine in China especially to those who loves searching for Warez / illegal stuff, but automatically redirecting people who pay for their internet access service into Baidu is just a dirty trick, because they just tricking their users especially to those who’s can be considered as newcomer to the internet world (read: those who didn’t know that major search engine like Google exists) thinking that Baidu is just the same as Google, Live.com and Yahoo Search

I think it’d be better for them to show a page telling that this site blocked as shown on below image for an example instead of using DNS Redirection at the ISP Level to prevent confusion for some people

yes,i live in hangzhou, and i found the same thing like this, when a visit google blog serch, i found it was baidu’s page. i thought my computer had something wrong, and i know the reason now.

Dansguardian

2 Comment(s)

Kage | Nov 18, 2007 at 8:14 / 8:14 AM | Links to this comments | Reply

Well, that’s a communist government for you, right?

Even though China is moving towards a free and open economy, you still have elements of a command system (communist). A lot of citizens don’t even know what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 or they know but was told it was foreign spies trying to take over the government or something.

Zachary | Jan 4, 2008 at 16:37 / 4:37 PM | Links to this comments | Reply

Thats pretty far fetched, Since when i was in China anybody i met knew about Tianamen. They Just prefer not to talk about it