The business and politics of search engines: A comparative study of Baidu and Google’s search results of Internet events in China

Abstract

Despite growing interest in search engines in China, relatively few empirical studies have examined their sociopolitical implications. This study fills several research gaps by comparing query results (N = 6320) from China's two leading search engines, Baidu and Google, focusing on accessibility, overlap, ranking, and bias patterns. Analysis of query results of 316 popular Chinese Internet events reveals the following: (1) after Google moved its servers from Mainland China to Hong Kong, its results are equally if not more likely to be inaccessible than Baidu's, and Baidu's filtering is much subtler than the Great Firewall's wholesale blocking of Google's results; (2) there is low overlap (6.8%) and little ranking similarity between Baidu's and Google's results, implying different search engines, different results and different social realities; and (3) Baidu rarely links to its competitors Hudong Baike or Chinese Wikipedia, while their presence in Google's results is much more prominent, raising search bias concerns. These results suggest search engines can be architecturally altered to serve political regimes, arbitrary in rendering social realities and biased toward self-interest.

The social-mediated crisis communication research: Revisiting dialogue between organizations and publics in crises of China

“…Meanwhile, several other contextual factors such as face-saving/giving, favor-seeking/giving, relationship (Guanxi) and sentiment (Renqing), and the centralized political system may also challenge the Western-dominated crisis communication practice and characterize a distinctive dialogue between organizations and publics on social media in crises Jiang, 2014). Rooted in Confucianism, the Chinese culture emphasized face (Mienzi), favor (enhui), relationship (Guanxi), and sentiment (Renqing).…”

Dr. Google, what can you tell me about homeopathy? Comparative study of the top10 websites in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Mexico and Spain

“…Likewise, and regarding the scope of content providers, one must also take into account their desire to be algorithmically recognizable (Gillespie, 2014;, applying SEO techniques to please algorithms and be chosen to hold the first ranking positions, which are the ones that receive the most views (Gonzalo-Penela, 2015;Lee, 2005). Due to the opacity with which Google protects its algorithms (Pasquale, 2015;Gillespie, 2017), it is not possible to know exactly the formula they use to order the results, but it is known that there is the influence of certain factors that make search results not global, although they may seem so (Jiang, 2014a;2014b).…”

“…Elements that influence the ranking are the language, the wording, the popularity of the site, the clicks (Jiang, 2014b). As for the popularity factor, which is very important, it also falls into the dynamics that, obviously, if the sites that receive the most visits are the first ones, with those visits they reinforce their popularity, following the rich-get-richer dynamics.…”

“…Any search engine, by ordering the webs and giving priority to some contents over others, already offers a biased view (Lewandowski, 2017;Rieder;Sire, 2014;Jiang, 2014b) or one of the multiple visions of the web (Koed-Madsen, 2016), but the factors taken into account by Google to personalize the search results constitute an extra bias that is invisible to the user. Haim; Graefe; Brosius (2018) indicate that this personalization, depending on the user's data, is present but that it does not isolate the subjects in a bubble, nor completely reduces the range of opinions.…”

IT Professionals’ Personality, Personal Characteristics, and Commitment: Evidence from a National Survey

“…Information technology (IT) is one of the most critical sectors globally (Guha & Chakrabarti, 2014). Information technology professionals play a crucial role in protecting the organization's sensitive data by shaping, maintaining, and implementing IT security measures (Jiang, 2014;Luftman & et al, 2013). However, the IT line of work is fraught with stress, which has been identified as a contributor to high employee turnover and lack of organizational commitment in the field (Lounsbury, Sundstrom, Levy, & Gibson, 2014;Padma & et al, 2015).…”