Baidu To Lose Its Advantage By Going Public?
from the the-perils-of-going-public dept
Last week, when Chinese search engine Baidu announced plans to go public, we linked to the SiliconBeat report saying that Baidu's one big advantage over Google (an investor in Baidu) was that Baidu pointed people to illegal copies of music. That leads to the obvious question of whether or not going public in the US would put pressure on Baidu to stop this practice. The answer, apparently, is yes. Baidu has said that they will be taking out all the links to downloadable music from their site. They've already removed 3,000 and will be looking at another 50,000. Of course, if this is their one main advantage over Google -- and they're removing it -- you have to wonder what they're left with? It might make for a questionable long term investment if going public strips them of the one factor that differentiates them from the competition.
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forwarding... by thatguy on Jul 19th, 2005 @ 10:06am
Why wouldn't they simply do what they did before and forward people to Baidu when they visit Google? Do people in China actually get sent to google when they type it in or are they still being sent to Baidu?
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Re: forwarding... by Mike on Jul 19th, 2005 @ 10:14am
No, the forwarding only happened for a short time, when the gov't freaked out about Google.
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No Subject Given by Block Sheep on Jul 19th, 2005 @ 10:31am
Why do foreign companies (especially in China of all places) bow down to the RIAA?
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Re: forwarding... by thatguy on Jul 19th, 2005 @ 12:15pm
Then what would stop them from "freaking out" again in order to keep Baidu popular over there?
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Re: forwarding... by Mike on Jul 19th, 2005 @ 1:50pm
True, to some extent, if the purpose was to keep Baidu popular... but it wasn't. It had much more to do with Google than Baidu.
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oh no! by gaBy on Jul 18th, 2006 @ 6:50pm
No! How can they do that! I agree that Baidu's advantage is on the ability for the user to download music, so why are they takin it? with that ability being taken away, i'd use Google instead.
That's really wrong.
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