Alibaba and Baidu in Search Engine War

Alibaba has launched a new search engine called aliyun.com and hopes to challenge Baidu and, to a larger extent, Google with this newest release. 

 

 

The time has come when the most important declarations of war are those declared on the internet. It has begun people, WAR. 

 

The largest e-commerce website in China, responsible for such wonders as the online payment platform Alipay takes pride in its status within China, and is therefore keen to show off its latest development and gage the reaction from users and competitors. 

 

This new part of the company will be hosted under Alibaba Group's subsidiary named AliCloud.  It will offer four main features: internet, maps, news and, of course, images. Now, although nothing else has been announced, there is significant scope for further developments for the brand new search engine. This is, after all, the very first version.

 

 

E-commerce companies in China are at each other's throats; Qihoo notably launched its search engine so.com in the midst of last summer. This move was an attempt to chomp on Baidu's part of the market, and it proved successful with Qihoo jumping to second place on the popularity scale. 

 

Baidu remains King of Search with 73% of the market share. Admittedly, slightly ailing compared to before. Poor Baidu, it has had the most outstanding growth for years and people just keep on complaining. 

 

 

As can be imagined, Baidu is fuming at this new development and Google is keeping a watchful eye on it from the top floor of its lair in Mordor. 

 

Some may claim that a less obvious hegemony by Baidu is healthy for this part of the market. Remains to be seen…

 

 

What does this say about the Search Engine Optimization scene? As Google stays at the top of the top, we all learn their ranking methods and algorithms. However, if there are more search engines well surely that means more time discovering and figuring out how best to enhance a website for each search engine. This will be time consuming but inevitable as results depend on it. The office is buzzing with excitement at the thought of all this new learning.