Baidu Blogsearch: A Disappointing Product

Written by Tangos on December 12, 2006
Tags:,

Baidu BlogsearchBaidu finally launched its long-waited blog search service last week. In the widely-quoted report by People’s Daily, it is said Baidu Blogsearch is “the first Chinese search service specifically for blogs”. But it is not correct. Baidu is facing competition from Qikoo, Souyo and other small players.

According to Yu Jun, a senior executive with Baidu, “the service was based on a database of billions of websites, including all the blogs supported by Chinese blog service providers and individual blog websites.” However, by my using experience, it is a disappointing service, or say the most disappointing service so far released by Baidu. Most of the comments from bloggers are also negative.

Currently, Baidu Blogsearch allows users to search keyword in blog posts, and sort the results by relevance or by date (default). You can only search blog post, no search for blogs, and no advanced search option so far.

I tried to search “Asian Game” (亚运会) in Baidu, Google and Qikoo. Baidu returns about 37,500 results, while Google blogsearch and Qikoo have 13,253 and 21,693 results. It seems Baidu beats competitors in number of indexed Chinese blog posts. However, when you analyse the result carefully, you will find that there are many results from Baidu Space (or Hi.baidu). If sorted by date, among top 50 results for “Asian Game”, only two of them are not from Baidu Space. But when I change to sort by relevance, it is totally different, most of the top results (41 out of 50) are from Sina blog. Does Baidu think the blog posts from Sina has much higher relevance than those from other blog hosting services? And the first result for “Asian Game”, when sorted by relevance, is a blog post published on October. I think Baidu has problem in balance relevance and freshness.

One of the key difference between web search and blog search, I think, is that blog search has much higher requirement on time. When I search “Asian Game” in Baidu Blogsearch now, the latest posts are five hours ago, in Google blogsearch, I can find the posts published one hour ago in Hexun Blog, if I do not count in blogs hosting in Blogspot, which Baidu blogsearch does not index. In Qikoo, I can also find blog posts just two hours ago in Sina’s blog. It is obvious that Baidu has to shorten the time of index of blogsearch.

Finally I use “site: url” parameter to search the number of blog pages indexed by Baidu blogsearch for top 10 blog service providers, the results are as follows, the results are not fully consistent with the ranks.

2 Responses to “Baidu Blogsearch: A Disappointing Product”

  1. Luyi Chen on December 12th, 2006 1:19 pm

    The other bad thing about Baidu blog search is that it doesn’t support link search. Without this feature, a search engine is not qualified to be called a blog search engine. Maybe I don’t know the search shortcut for link search in Baidu. I tried ‘link:’, which doesn’t work. I also tried to input links including http prefix into search box directly (like Icerocket), and it doesn’t work either.

  2. Baidu have their own Blogsearch now - NetResults on December 18th, 2006 11:33 am

    [...] Baidu, the top search engine in China have recently showed their interest to include blogs in their search results. It will include blogs from various sources, as long as they are written in Chinese. This is an appropriate action by Baidu, because there’s already more than 20 million chinese bloggers that are existed today. Baidu is the fourth most viewed search engine in the entire world, holding over 60 percent of the Chinese search market. China currently has a population of 1.3 billion, of which there are 130 million using Internet frequently, and are only second in the online market to America. With the launch of their blog search utilities feature, Baidu is expecting get more new users. Based on what other bloggers are saying that Baidu Blogsearch is a disappointing product. I went and checked out their blogsearch, and from what I can see, it looks very similar to Google BlogSearch. Well, I was hoping to see something better. [...]

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