According to a New York Times report in September 2006 (quoting Bloomberg stats), Baidu is the leading Chinese language site, with a market share of around 57 percent for search engines and around 50 percent for advertising revenue. Google, the closest second, only has around 33 percent market share for search engines and 16 percent for advertising revenue. Baidu is reportedly very strong in Chinese MP3 music content and the first to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search in China.

Going by Alexa’s Traffic Rankings, Baidu is within the Top 10 worldwide and Number 1 in China. The other top 9 sites in China are (details extracted and summarized from Wikipedia):

1. Tencent QQ 腾讯网: The most popular free instant messaging software in Asia, and the world’s third most popular IM service. Over 160 million QQ users in China alone. Offers many subfeatures including games, pets, ringtone downloads, etc.
2. Sina.com.cn 新浪新闻中心: The largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal, with over 30 channels covering various aspects, including news, sports, technology, finance, advertising, entertainment, fashion, travel and more.
3. Sohu.com 搜狐: Offers advertising, a search engine, and other services.
4. NetEase 163.com 网易新闻: Search engine technology and massively multiplayer online gaming.
5. Taobao.com 淘宝网: A consumer-to-consumer trade site for Chinese customers. The main competitor to eBay in China for online auctions. Currently captures over 65% of the e-auction market. Part of the Alibaba 阿里巴巴 e-commerce conglomerate.
6. Yahoo! China 雅虎中国: News, information, email, and a search engine
7. Google China 谷歌中国: Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.
8. TOM Online: A mobile Internet company, offering a variety of online and mobile services, including wireless internet and online advertising.
9. Microsoft Network (MSN): Dialup access and content provider.

WITH THIS BACKGROUND INFO, plus more details from Google Finance (added via links on the company names after this point), Keso’s articles on Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) now make much more sense:

In Baidu & Google China 《谷歌篇》, Keso considers Google China as Baidu’s strongest competitor. Both have very similar business models. Their main source of income is advertisements. However, Google is restrained by its headquarters while Baidu is constrained by the sentiments of its stock investors. In addition [taken from "Baidu & Alibaba"], Google, with its ever-expanding portfolio of productivity tools (such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Analytics, Webmaster Central, Apps for Your Domain), has been positioning itself as an economical search engine. Baidu, with its strong entertainment orientation, risk lowering its brand image, might raise costs for its advertisers and thereby lowering its value as a commercial “spine”.

In Baidu & Sina 《新浪篇》, Keso explains that Sina, with its recent launch of a music library, looks ready to compete with Baidu in the MP3 Search market. Sina, however, has quite fragile media relations. The whole situation is also likely to change with Baidu’s newly acquired news publisher license.

In Baidu & Tencent QQ 《腾讯篇》, Keso explains that Baidu and QQ (Tencent Holding) are very likely to top the charts if there’s ever a popularity contest among Internet youths in China. Interestingly, the nett value of QQ is larger than Baidu by 1.8 times. Baidu, with its huge in successes MP3 Search and Baidu Post Bar, has been expanding aggressively into social networking — moving closer and closer to QQ’s business model. The two companies look set to have a battle soon.

In Baidu & Alibaba 《阿里巴巴篇》, Keso explains that Alibaba, with its strong B2B business model, basically links suppliers to buyers. Thus it was originally not a competitor of Baidu. However, in August 2005, Alibaba acquired Yahoo! China. And once its estimated value of over 4 billions USD (超过40亿美元) was announced around the same period, people started comparing Alibaba with Baidu. In addition, more and more people are using search engines to find business partners. With increasing breadth and depth of search engine applications, the entire Internet has now been transformed into a gigantic trading platform!

At first impressions, besides the minimalist search (搜藏) interface, Baidu seems to offer many services similar to those offered in Google: e.g. news (新闻), images (图片), maps (地图), video (视频), Blogger-equivalent (空间), BlogSearch (博客搜索) and toolbar (超级搜霸). However, one key difference seems to be in the extent of integration. Unlike Google, the many services in Baidu feel like subfeatures of ONE service and not many separate services. I only need to log in once.

What do you think? Have you used Baidu and Google? Which do you prefer, and why?

See also discussion on the Asia Social Media 2.0 Forum.

How is this possible? Basically, all external links in most blogs have automatic rel="nofollow" attributes. The DoFollow plugin disables these attributes and the Show Top Commentators plugin displays the names (linked to websites if desired) and number of comments that others have made recently on my blog. In other words, as Lucas put it, “…leaving a comment here gets you a followed link back to your own site through the top commentators on the sidebar.”

And since I have a good spam filter and will continue to moderate comments on this blog, I’m not worried about spam comments. Note though that only on-topic comments will be displayed. For off-topic comments, please Contact Me or just “Shout”.

Afternote on 2007-03-15: After reading Andy Beard’s Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins, I’ve decided to reward commenters (who have posted 3 or more comments) and not just anyone. So, I’ve switched to LinkLove. I hope this won’t be perceived as calculating. I merely think that a dialog on a post (or with a blogger) surely isn’t made up of just one comment.

Afternote on 2007-03-16: “NoFollow” started because of spam. I started using DoFollow because I thought that we’ve got spam under control through spam filters. However, I forgot that there are other more subtle forms of spam — e.g. useless / meaningless one-liners. I’m waiting now to use the plugin that rewards special comments because basically, I’d like to reward Quality more than Quantity. And I believe that this is the principle behind Google’s PageRank too.

“… I get about twice the pageviews of mattcutts.com, but his Alexa pageview ranking is about 25 times more than mine (I got this by looking at the 1 year, most highly smoothed graph, and then squinting to guess at the mean).

“What that means is that people with the Alexa toolbar installed are 25 times more likely to view a page on Matt’s site versus mine, but overall, all users view twice as many pages on my site.

“That’s a 50 to 1 difference introduced by the selection bias of Alexa. Presumably this is because Matt’s site is really appealing to a core group of SEO enthusiasts, many of whom also like the Alexa toolbar.”

IN A SIMILAR VEIN, John Chow wrote:

“Alexa is a tool that many webmasters and advertisers used to gauge the size of a website. The Alexa ranking is based on a three month running average. The number shown is where a site ranks on the internet… The main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If you do not have the toolbar running, you do not affect the rankings of the sites you visit. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to cheat the system. Just get a few friends to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday. It does not take many people to break into the top 100,000. You can even do it all by yourself by refreshing your site over and over again. Get a dozen friends to do it and you’re break into top 20,000 easily.”

Alexa, by the way, works only on Internet Explorer. Now, perhaps all these explain why this blog’s Alexa ranking is 6,588,931? However, why two particularly trivial links which have nothing to do with this blog are listed in Alexa — they are totally different from the many links recognized by Technorati and 10,500 found via a Google search? Also, how is it that an empty blog such as one that’s created by default in an Elgg community blog and my Elgg profile could be ranked 64,954? Hmmm… just because both are on Elgg.net (also ranked 64,954)? Sheeeshh… no wonder! My test blog at Blogger.com has a rank of 15, just like Blogger itself!

When I scrolled to the bottom of an Alexa page, I found this statement, “Alexa’s directory listings are provided by Open Directory and enhanced by Alexa”. At the Open Directory (a.k.a. Dmoz) site, I read that it apparently has 75,151 editors and 4,830,584 sites listed in over 590,000 categories. According to one of its Help pages, “Depending on the activity level of the editors in your area, it may take up to 2 weeks or more for your site to be reviewed.”

However, I’ve tried for months and my blog is still not listed on this Open Directory. The oft-repeated reason given on support forum had been along this line: There has been a huge backlog and the editors couldn’t find enough time to clear that yet.

Likewise, I’ve tried for months to claim my blog on Technorati, but to no avail. The reason (given by Admin) looks familiar: My blog (along with many others) apparently could have been flagged for review, the support staff are facing a huge backlog and couldn’t find enough time to clear that yet.

I wonder. When I cannot claim my blog on Technorati, is my blog considered non-existent to Technorati? A search among the blog posts in Technorati yields 11 links, but a search in the blog directory yields this error message:

“Huh?

There are blogs, and then there’s whatever you just typed in. If it’s a blog, we don’t know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it’s a blog that doesn’t exist. Maybe you don’t exist. (In which case, please ignore this.)”

While I truly appreciate the invaluable services that Alexa, Dmoz and Technorati provide, I also truly don’t understand what is meant by “flagged for review”. Who flags a bona-fide blog for review by Technorati and thereby stop it from being claimed even by its legitimate owner? In any case, is there a way to open up this listing of blogs that have been flagged for review, Digg-style perhaps, so that more people can comment on them and thus help the editors/admin guys speed up and clear this site-listing backlog?

Afternote on 2007-03-16: Please HELP ME claim my blog on Technorati. Add me as a Fave on Technortiat by clicking this -» and then feel free to delete it later.

So, my PageRank (PR) is different for the same URL with and without www? Is my PR = 2+3 = 5?

SUBSEQUENTLY, I entered the Google Webmasters Help group. Was typing a query in the “Crawling, indexing, and ranking” category when Google very intelligently displayed this thread, Different page rank for the same URL with and without www.

According to Webado (aka Christina):

“The difference in PR between www and non www versions of the same url, also between example.com/ and example.com/index.html (for instance) has existed ever since PR has been reported. PR is always relative to the url, NOT to the page content that a url points to. All those url’s are as different as if they were totally different sites.

“At times the PR might appear to be equal – that would be because both forms are being used to about the same extent, and have incoming links of about the same quality and quantity.

“It makes sense to consolidate into one url alone all accesses meant to be for one particular page – the result will also be a consolidation of pr, with a possible increase in the final pr value for that chosen page.

“The new option in Webmaster Tools is there to take care of what’s already been indexed – but you, the webmaster, also have to do your job of redirecting url’s to one single preferred url format.

“Assuming you haven’t done either of these 2 things, and assuming your 2 url’s used to have the same PR and now are different, thats’ due to changing conditions. The incoming links to one form must have dwindled, been discounted for some reason, while the incoming links to the other form must have picked up. PR gets recalculated every few months from data a few months old. PR is also not necessarily the same across all Google Datacenters which are numerous and not in sync.”

In another similar thread, Richard L. Trethewey wrote:

“PageRank is calculated through a combination of factors beyond the simple number of links. The exact method Google currently uses is not public knowledge, but in the founders’ original thesis they describe a formula which is widely believed to still be the fundamental method. For each link that points to a page, the PageRank of that target page is increased by an amount roughly equal to the PageRank score of the page where that link resides divided by the number of links on that page. You also need to keep in mind that the PageRank score shown on the Google Toolbar is taken from a publically available database that is only updated periodically (recently, its been every 3 months or so). But Google has an internal PageRank database that they use for ranking purposes which is updated continuously as they crawl the web. There seems to be a PageRank update in progress, so you should wait a couple of days to see if your PageRank score improves.

“But the best thing you can do for your site is to set up a server code 301 redirect for all requests for pages from the old .com domain and redirect them to the new .org.uk domain. In a few weeks, all of the major search engines will merge their records of the two domains and your rankings should improve. It would also be a good idea to ask thewebmaster of any site that still links to the old .com domain to link to the new .org.uk domain to help speed up the process. But installing that 301 redirect is very important.”

And so, that’s what I have done recently, adding a 301 redirect to channel all requests for the URL without www to the URL with www. Now, waiting and hoping that my PR will be doubled (almost) soon.

(See also Matt Cutt’s SEO advice: url canonization and Michael Bloch’s Giving search engine spiders direction – 301 redirect.)