Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Baidu beats Google in delivering detailed online map of Chinese cities. You can now browse through a quite detailed online map database through map.baidu.com. It does not yet have the "Satellite" version but the city maps are quite accurate and impressive. For some reason, Google has not yet attached Chinese maps with their map engine although you can see some detailed satellite images of some major cities in China.

Baidu is one of the leading Chinese search engines. It uses similar spider (bot) driven data collection structure as Google in archiving and indexing online contents. There had been rumors on how baidu “Copied” ideas from Google. From a user’s perspective, there are definitely many similarities between the two search engines. One thing Baidu does and Google doesn’t do is MP3 indexing. It is quite insane how many mp3 songs you can search and download through Baidu MP3 search engine. This has raised some serious concerns over intellectual property and copy rights related issues. Over the last few years, Google has purchased some significant stakes of Baidu. However MP3 searches help Baidu to generate their loyal client communities. So, it’s less likely for Baidu to completely abandon this service in the near future. I am anxious to find out how is Google China going to work with Baidu in the super heated search engine industry.

VS.