Baidu Sued As Search Monopoly In China

Leading Chinese search engine Baidu has been sued by Chinese medical B2B marketplace Qmyy.com to prevent its site from being blocked or dropped by the engine. According to a factually lean report in China Daily:

Qmyy.com required Baidu to stop blocking its web pages from appearing on its search results and pay 1.106 million yuan ($161,460) for the losses that such acts have incurred. Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court accepted the case on Dec 26.

According to Li Changqing, a lawyer representing Qmyy.com, the company made the decision to file a lawsuit after it failed to reach an out-of-court settlement with Baidu.

This is a mirror image of suits that Google has defended against in the US in the past. It’s not unlike the KinderStart case of 2006, for example, which was won by Google. Qmyy apparently also filed an anti-trust complaint with the relevant regulatory authorities in China prior to filing the court action.

According to China IntelliConsulting Corp., Baidu has a roughly 65 percent market share in China, while Google is second with 22 percent. Others, including Yahoo, trail far behind. Baidu is the third largest search engine in the world by users and volume, by virtue of the huge size of the Chinese market. Baidu is also now in Japan.

Here are some comScore data on the Asia-Pacific search markets: