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Steven: Baidu's Scruples Questioned on Tianya
Baidu's (Nasdaq:BIDU) conscience has been taken to task again, not from news of strikes that came out this weekend, but on a forum speculating that the company blocked content to help a well-connected street racer save face.
Similar to stories that claimed Baidu censored news regarding the Sanlu milk scandal, a May 9 post on popular Chinese forum Tianya.com said Baidu took money from the family of a driver, the son of a wealthy businessman, who stuck and killed a Zhejiang University graduate in return for filtering information related to the accident. The speculation surfaced after an Internet user tried searching license plate number "608z0" on both Baidu and Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) and came up with different results -- supposedly nothing on baidu.com and pages of news and information on google.cn.
The author of the post, which had attracted nearly 100,000 views and more than 10,000 responses by May 15, called for the public to boycott baidu.com.
Not much has happened in the way of a boycott, and the differing results were likely due to search technology. According to another post in the forum thread, searches for "Hangzhou car accident" returned 7,940 related news articles on baidu.com the same day that the license plate search came up with none.
Still, the vast majority of people commenting on the post believed that Baidu doctored its results, indicating that the company still has some work to do to clean up its image among Chinese netizens.
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Steven Ho covers China's for-profit education and travel sectors.
