Around the Net

Google Dot... Er, Baidu Dot Com?

Baidu is China's reigning search champ -- though contrasting reports have recently been published with regards to how much market share the Chinese leader has over rivals like Google.

In today's TechCrunch post, Duncan Riley poses one possible reason for discrepancies when it comes to China's search volume reports -- namely, that certain Chinese ISPs are redirecting attempted Google visits to Baidu.

Riley pastes a screenshot from a Shanghai-based developer who says that he typed in blogsearch.google.com into his URL bar and was sent to the Baidu homepage. The user was on China NetCom, the country's second largest ISP.

While one isolated incident does not a conspiracy make, the comments that follow the post yield more insights, including responses from Danny Sullivan (who links to past articles from news sources like Wired that detail the same tactics) and other Chinese users who say that its not just Google traffic being redirected, but Yahoo's as well.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »

Next story loading loading..