[photopress:baidu_tedian.jpg,full,alignright]CCTV has reported on air that it now has evidence that Chinese Internet search engine Baidu.com will rank web sites based on the money paid as opposed to the service quality provided. This can hardly be thought of as a major expose as the same system has been used by portals and some search engines in other countries for many years.
In a recent news program, CCTV cited a game player surnamed Han who said he contacted a website that ranked at the top of Baidu’s search engine to buy some game coins. He paid RMB600 for the coins, but was not given any reply from the seller and realized he was cheated by that website.
Han was angry that Baidu.com would place such a cheating website at the top position of its search engine ranking.
The first question surely must be as to how much credence you give to a game player who is having an argument with an advertiser over the delivery of goods? On that basis it would be possible to provide hundreds of people condemning eBay for naughty deeds.
Is Baidu responsible for the performance of the sites it lists? Probably not. It is not an easy argument to sustain. And it is not much of a news story. On newspapers it would be called, rightly, a beat-up. Making much from very little.
Currently most of the search engine service providers in China are providing search marketing services based on the amount of fees that clients pay instead of the quality of the service they provide or the amount of links back to the website. Yes, it is thought that second way is how Google’s algorithm generally works. But it is not known. No one knows precisely how Google works.
Legal experts quoted in local media say that there is no law to regulate the behavior of the search engine service providers so they suggest consumers not to rely too much on the search results of those search engines. Seems a sensible idea.
Source: China Tech News
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