Remembering history is not the favorite hobby of business people, but in the case of the Internet, history happens fast.
Google took a minority share of Baidu.com Inc., a Chinese search engine,
Baidu announced on Tuesday. That is -- for more than one reason -- an interesting choice.
Baidu is the largest independent search engine, but much smaller than the leading portals
Sohu.com and
Sina.com.
Two years ago, Baidu put itself on the media radar and angered many Chinese Internet users. China's censors had installed new filtering software to keep unwanted information out of the country. For yet unclear reasons, Google was very prominent on the hit list of those new IT-goodies and people who wanted to Google ended mostly up in the Baidu.com website.
Making good money out of a bad thing is a typical Chinese tradition, and the relevant authorities redirected traffic to a group of selected websites. Nasty -- and never confirmed -- rumors at the time said that Google was banned on the request of Baidu, so the filters could make good money from the redirected traffic to Baidu.com. From a marketing point of view the system did not perform very well and it was actually very bad for the name of the companies involved. After a few weeks traffic was no longer redirected, but simply blocked, until the filtering fizzled out. Strangely enough, nobody has asked Baidu about this incident, and Google has not yet reacted.
