Baidu is currently the most widely used search engine in China.
Founded in Beijing by Robert Li and Eric Xu in the year 2000, Baidu had the largest market share in China in 2020, at over 70%.
Google, on the other hand, has withdrawn from the Chinese market, because China blocks most Google services through strict censorship. With a market share of under 1 %, Google plays a vanishingly small role (this market share comes from search queries from Hong Kong which are, as of Marh 2021, still working).
Baidu crawlers and user-agents
Baidu has its own crawlers – the Baidu spiders. These spiders can be blocked via the robot.txt file. The following user agents can be used for this purpose:
User-agent: BaiduspiderThe full list of user agents are shown below and more information is available .
- PC search – Baiduspider
- Mobile search – Baiduspider
- Image search – Baiduspider-image
- Video search – Baiduspider-video
- News search – Baiduspider-news
- Baidu bookmark – Baiduspider-favo
- Union baidu – Baiduspider-cpro
- Business search – Baiduspider-ads
- other search – Baiduspider
In addition to its search engine, Baidu also offers a number of other services, including a communication platform and a Chinese alternative to Wikipedia. The company also offers an autonomous driving solution via the Apollo Robotaxi and a voice search solution via DuerOS.
