Baidu under fire for fraudulent search results

The Financial Times today reported China's homegrown search engine titan, Baidu under fire for admitting to using its website to market fraudulent information.

The local search engine which enjoys a stronghold in the Chinese search market, was reported to mix sponsored links with actual popularity and relevance based search results without appropriate indication. In fact, this model which allows advertisers to bid for search keywords with the highest bidder placed on the top of search results, contributes significantly to Baidu's revenues, as opposed to its competitors in the Chinese and global markets.

The Full FT Article Here: Baidu’s search model under fire

This incident simply reflects the failure, or rather difficulty of traffic rankings and other web metrics in the Chinese market.
Despite the aggressively growing Chinese Online Advertising market, many Chinese advertisers are still unfamiliar with the tricks of the trade. Instead, the frenzy of online spending stems from a blind bandwagon effect fuelled by China's incredible Internet proliferation rates. With over 250mn users connected, spending is spurred more by a fear of missing out, than deliberated marketing campaigns.

The lack of awareness of advertisers is exacerbated by rumored attempts of portals and premium websites masking their actual traffic performances, buffing it up with fraudulent clicks and unsubstantiated traffic. Newly emergent services who claim a unabridged and accurate measurement for campaigns have also been allegedly boycotted by these premium sites, denying them of the reach and exposure they thrive upon. These attempts have made it extremely difficult for 3rd party measurement houses such as Nielsen NetRatings to provide accurate and timely data.

While Online metric models might be a thriving business model elsewhere in the world, it may take much time before best practices to filter through, and for the concept to take-off in China.