Japanese SEO,

The Chinese search engine Baidu launched its official service in Japan in
January. (www.baidu.jp) Baidu is the number one search engine in China, and is aiming to take some share away from Yahoo and Google in Japan. One of its advantages, it claims, is its ability to analyze Kanji characters. Hmm. Maybe that can be an advantage, I thought.

Now, more than a month later, I haven’t come across with any “real” buzz coming from users and so I decided to check it out myself. I opened three browser windows - for Yahoo, Google and Baidu - searched for a few words and compared the results. The first thing that I noticed was that there are no PPC ads on Baidu. The search results - what comes up on the first page or the next - are somewhat similar to those of Google and quite different from those of Yahoo. The page titles are limited to a shorter length on Baidu, which to me is not great. Instead, Baidu shows a date that appears to be the date on which the page was created. That is good. Other than that, I don’t see any major differences.

Overall, I don’t see anything that stands out on the Baidu search engine that is better than its competitors. Well, that doesn’t sound good for Baidu, does it?