December 1, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Baidu, China’s leading internet search engine is in the process of drastically rethinking the way it does business in response to a scandal involving the advertising of questionable medical services. It appears that Baidu let a number of unlicensed medical companies buy sought after positions on its search platform, which hugely increased the number of people clicking on the links to useless, yet very expensive medical services.
Understandably the Chinese public are none too impressed with Baidu and the adverse reaction has dragged the company’s stock down sharply. In response Baidu CEO, Robin Lee, has promised swift decisive action and he would appear to be delivering, sacking several members of Baidu staff and implementing a process of double checking the licenses of all the medical institutions that they do business with.
According to Baidu the scandal was made possible by employees forging the proper documentation for the unlicensed medical practitioners and all staff found to be involved with this have now been dismissed.
This scandal notwithstanding, Baidu is still the main search engine in China by a long way. The company controls about two thirds of the Chinese market – by far the largest market in terms of people. Strange as this may seem to us, Google ranks a distant second.
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