Baidu & Brewing Controversy

Roger Ehrenberg points to a simmering click fraud issue similar in potential and nature to the google adclick issue - this time the issue centers around the chinese search engine Baidu search engine. Roger points to interesting posts laying out the basics - one poster laid out a pretty damning fact pattern indicating that Baidu might have internally boosted click results for a paid-search client costing that client millions of yuan (hundreds of thousands of US$). Apparently another post suggested that Baidu advertisers were protesting against supposed click fraud. While clearly Google has also taken steps to address this issue by providing data on click fraud it catches, and reporting these figures to advertisers , we have to see how Baidu responds to this . Roger points out that on issues involving Baidu, on a search, Baidu came back with only about 6,700 returns, while Google's count was closer to 45,000 (- 7x the number of Baidu). Something is brewing there in the middle kingdom – Baidu is so popular in China, I know for a fact that Google comes a close second to it in terms of popularity and usage within china.