Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am very pleased to attend this year's Sino-British Internet Roundtable. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my views on the development of search technologies and the market prospect amid the current financial crisis based on Baidu's experiences in the search engine industry over the years.
1. The impact of the financial crisis on the development of China's Internet industry is relatively small, and the continuing fast growth of the user's base in China poses higher requirements and tougher challenges to the technical and service capabilities of search engines.
Currently, we are undergoing a major economic crisis that has overwhelmed the whole world. The adjustment of the real economy triggered by this crisis constitutes a grim challenge to all industries. Fortunately, while Internet development is slowing down in other parts of the world, China's Internet industry remains one of the few industries that are still growing. According to data released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in January 2009, China's Internet industry had been enjoying an explosive growth. By the end of 2008, China had registered 2.878 million web sites and 16 billion web pages, a rise of 90 percent year on year. The number of Internet users in China now has exceeded 316 million, overtaking the U.S. to be number one in the world.
Such a huge and continuously growing base of web pages and users represents an extremely rare opportunity, as well as a tremendous and totally new challenge to China's ISPs, especially to a search engine like Baidu. This means we are facing unprecedented and massive needs of numerous types from users. We are being pushed to the forefront of R&D for Internet search technologies, and only through innovation and by providing users with cutting-edge and high-performance products and services that cater to their needs could we remain undefeated. Because of the growth in the user quantity, traffic and contents of the Internet in China, according to our rough estimates, Baidu needs to increase its technical services capability at least three fold a year to meet the needs of users.
Actually, it is because of this awareness that Baidu has long been spending heavily on its technological and product development, as well as innovation, in hopes of providing a better search experience to users through the ongoing evolution of technologies and products.
2. Future search engine technologies will become richer, smarter and more targeted. Baidu has launched Operation Aladdin to explore the massive amount of "hidden web" information in an effort to lay the foundation for the future development of search engines.
For Baidu, future search engines should be richer, smarter, more targeted and simpler. To this end, we have launched a plan to develop the Aladdin platform.
Currently, information that can be retrieved by a search engine is only a very small portion of all the information we have, and lots of information do not exist in the form of web pages, yet. Even among the information that has been put on the web, there is still extensive amount that can't be captured by a search engine. Such information, including those hidden behind static links in many major databases, often is of high quality but hard to access directly. Baidu defines the information that still can't be covered by a search engine as "hidden information" or "hidden web." According to our most conservative estimate, the information that a search engine currently can locate accounts only two thousandth or even less of very valuable "hidden web" information. There is no doubt that this has raised higher requirements on the development of search engines – how to dig deep into "hidden web" information, and in the meantime, to open a third-party platform that can collect information far and wide to enable more users to easily get the information they need.
This is exactly what we want to solve in Operation Aladdin at Baidu. Last year, Baidu officially launched a plan to develop the Aladdin platform for the next generation of search service. We aim to unearth more and more valuable "hidden web" information on the one hand, and on the other, to integrate these types of information and present them to users in the most convenient, accurate and intelligent way.
Let me give you an example: At present, a search engine works by listing the search results of web sites related to the keywords that users input; and with the increase in searchable information for a search engine, a user may need to browse several pages or tens of pages to look for the information he or she needs. For instance, when you want to take the entrance exam to a graduate school, you will need to search for information about the school and field you are interested in. With existing search technologies, what you get will be just discrete web sites of schools, and you need to use your own judgment to roughly get the information you want after many clicks – and it might be information that is already outdated. But in the future, with the information digging and converging service of the Aladdin platform, the search results that you get may be a clear list, with real-time information about all schools and fields on one page. Moreover, this list can be automatically generated by our computer and also compiled and uploaded by other users themselves for sharing.
