Search Engine In China

There is no doubt that Baidu is the current leader of Chinese Internet search engine. Third-party statistics show that Baidu has occupied almost 65% of the market both in the mobile and desktop Internet market. The second place on the mobile side is Shenma search, and the second place on the desktop side is 360 search. In the global market, google is the biggest, accounting for more than 92% of the market share, Baidu is less than 1%. Today, let’s focus on the Chinese Internet.
Firstly, let’s try to understand how the search engine works.
Everyone knows that search engines can find almost everything we want. Where do these answers come from? The answer is “crawler”, what is a crawler? A crawler is a program that fetches website content from every corner of the Internet, from a server that stores various website content, and then organizes the information (index) and store into its own database. Just like a virtual library, every day the staff of this library must go to a lot of bookstores to find the books list in the bookstore, record them, and then store them in the library database. When you are looking for a book, go to the virtual library to find out which bookstores have the books you need and give you a list. You can choose one or more bookstores in the list to buy your book.

So we know how search engines work, bug how does search engine make money?
We started with Baidu, Chinese largest search engine. At the beginning of Baidu’s business, its business model was very simple, providing search for the portal websites. At that time, China’s largest portals, Sohu, Sina, etc., were all Baidu customers. Soon after, Baidu transformed into a search engine directly facing people. This is a huge turning point. After a series of operations, Baidu gradually became the first stop for users to access the Internet, and it has become the first traffic portal for the Internet in China. The simple search box on Baidu’s homepage opened the way of money making machine.

Almost all of the search engine’s profits come from advertising, such as Baidu, ads in the search results list, ads in the search results list sidebar, union ads, news feed ads, and so on.
These advertisements (called Baidu promotion) , we can find the entrance at https://tuiguang.baidu.com. What I have to mention is that I can not simply complete the registration process smoothly in Baidu promotion main site。The page UI and interaction make me crazy. Anyway, the effectiveness of search advertising, should be the best of all types of advertising. Because when people search for content, it must be the content people need. When the content of the advertisement matches the content that the one needs, then the possibility that he clicks on the advertisement and converts the final purchase is very high. When the content of the ad and the natural search results appear together and are difficult to distinguish, then the possibility of the user clicking on the ad is even higher.

Where is the ad coming from? How do advertisers advertise on Baidu?
Baidu has a large group of cooperative agents, distributed in various regions of China, agents can get very good prices from Baidu, cpt or cpa or cps and so on. They attract customers, provide customers with a variety of solutions To help customers create advertising ideas and put them on the Baidu promotion platform. When you register a company in China, you will soon receive a large number of calls asking if you have branding needs. 99% of these calls come from various advertising agencies. BTW, Chinese Internet has no privacy. Your mobile phone number is being sold at a low price everywhere. The advertisers that the agent brought to Baidu, I didn’t find reliable data, but I think that they should account for more than 80% of the total number of advertisers, and maybe even more, which explains why the simple registration process is so difficult.

How do advertisers’ ads show up to people who use search engines?
We envision a user who uses Baidu. He entered the “How about Magotan” in Baidu search. There is no doubt that this user has a great possibility to buy a car and is interested in the “Magotan” car. At this time, in the list of results searched by this user, there will be a lot of advertisements related to the Magotan car, which may be car sellers, car evaluation, car insurance. The number of advertisers is bound to be quite a lot, so who should be ranked first in the search engine? This is related to the search engine’s bidding strategy. The simple understanding is that in the scenario described above, for the keyword “Magotan”, who is willing to pay the highest advertising cost, who is in front, such as an advertiser is a car seller, he is willing to pay 100 yuan for one click, then this car seller will be the first in the search results. the user is likely to click on the ad to enter the car sellers website, one click, Baidu earned 100 yuan, car seller may get a customer’s information. This is the logic of search advertising.

So what is affiliate?
We know that when we browse different websites, we often see that there are pieces of advertising content in the website in China. The content of the advertisement has a bearer logo on the corner, which means that the website has joined the Baidu Advertising affiliate. Here is the introduction of a new role, that is, the affiliate, the affiliate is composed of the platform side and the affiliate members. What kind of logic is this? As mentioned above, the traffic of search engines and the good results of search advertising have attracted a large number of advertisers to search engines. How do search engines maximize their profits? Of course, as many users as possible to click on the advertiser’s ads, so the search engine needs more internet traffic to consume its advertiser’s ads, so a new platform — the affiliate was born. The website or app owner become a member of the affiliate. The members contribute traffic to the platform. The platform displays the advertisement on the websites or apps of the members. When the visitor clicks on the advertisement on the website or app, a display or click is generated, and the advertiser needs to pay to Baidu, and Baidu pays to the affiliate members.

You may find when two users access the same website at the same time, the advertisement content of the same corner is different. What is the reason for this?

We still go back to the user who searched for “Magotan” above. If the user usually uses Baidu map as navigator, the search engine can determine the location of his home and office. if this user has also searched “baby car” in Baidu, the search engine knows that this is a user who just gave birth to a child; similarly, through the analysis of the keywords of this user’s usual search, it is basically ok. A variety of information about a user, age, gender, income level, stage of life, marital status, geographic location, hobbies, etc., we call it portraits. Therefore, the search engine has mastered a large amount of information of ordinary netizens. The more searches are used, the more information is “sold out” to the search engine, and the more the search engine knows you. At this time, when the visitor visits the website of a member of the affiliate, the affiliate will who the visitor is, what interests and hobbies the visitor has, what they want to buy in the near future, etc. This information, such as the visitor is watching news from a news website, but the visitor searched for “Fitness Center” in Baidu last night, then it is likely that the affiliate advertisement on this news site is Gym near the visitor’s home or near the company . The news feed advertisement is the same, when the user browses Baidu’s news, interspersed with some advertisements, and is also an advertisement pushed according to the personal portrait of the visitor.

So, for advertisers, how to achieve the best delivery at the lowest cost (Search Engine Marketing)?
The most important thing is that the advertiser has an accurate understanding of his own brand and knows the best suitable audience for his product. For example, an advertiser who sells best green tea, his product audience may have these portraits: In Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, the age is over 35, and the income level is high. Then when Baidu’s promotion platform puts on advertising to create an advertising plan, he needs to circle the people who correspond to the portraits, so as to make their advertisements appear in the right users as much as possible. Of course, it is not enough. Advertisers need to constantly track the effectiveness of ad delivery, monitor the ad click rate, conversion rate for each day, and dynamically adjust the parameters of the circled crowd to achieve the best results.

For the website owner or brand , how can he put his content in front of the user search results (Search Engine Optimization)?
As we know,If you type keyword “SEO” in search engine, you will get a lot of tutorials on SEO, and even training courses. Yes, you can think that with SEO, you can present your content to the front of the user’s search results at zero cost. It sounds very nice, huh? What are the cores skills of SEO ? I’d like to talks about it, not very professional.

First of all, your content needs to be the content that search engines like, but the search engine is still a program. What does a program like? Structured data, with clear page title, page keywords, page summary description, page content title, page content, etc., if search engines are easy to find these key information on your website page, your content is high quality, it is easy to get to the front row.

It’s not enough to just search engines. Your content needs users to like it. So how? When a user searches for a keyword and your content appears in the search results list, the number of times the user clicks on your content is significantly more. When a search engine crawler fetches the content on the Internet, it finds that multiple websites have links to your website, which also indicates that your website content is popular, so your website weight will also rise, your website Will be more and more ranked in the front row of search results.

Why are Chinese search engines being criticized?
Medical advertisements, a large number of private hospitals pay heavily for keywords to place search engine advertisements, but the medical level of these private hospitals is worrying, causing a large number of netizens to spend money and not cure the disease. Baidu Wei Zexi incident has pushed such problems to a climax, causing The society and state institutions have paid close attention to it, and then other Chinese search engines such as 360 and Sogou can be said to be even worse in this respect!
The False advertisements, some types of advertisements, require qualifications, such as medical qualifications, but there are many advertisers who obtain qualifications through illegal ways and submit them through advertisement review, which leads to a large number of netizens being deceived,。
Not complying with the Robots agreement, such as 360 search does not comply with the ROBOTS agreement, crawling the content of the site.
The black goods are blamed, and the awareness of privacy protection of Chinese people is getting stronger and stronger. The black organization that sells user privacy and profits on the Internet steals the user’s private information through various technical, so that users who do not know the truth are thought to be search engines. Selling their information。
Content filtering, this is a matter at the national policy level and is beyond the scope of this article.