Baidu falling behind Google?

The famous web analyst Lu Bo Wang, who was behind the 2005 Chinese search engine market survey from state sponsored CNNIC, just released a new report.

The report is the result from a blind test of search results relevancy.

There are 2769 participants involved in 11,864 tests comparing two results from Baidu and Google, while the participants without knowledge of the identity of which search engine was used.

Among all participants, 48.2% favored Google's answers while 39.8% favored Baidu's answers. Additionally, 12.1% of the results were thought to be equally good.

News, entertainment, web and IT, business, online purchase, travel, science and education, government and public information are the eight areas queried.

Results relevancy, richness, and timeliness were being judged for preference.

Baidu only won by 5% in the entertainment area probably due to it's popular MP3 service. Google does not offer MP3 service in China yet.

Google won the rest seven areas. Some areas, such as travel, online purchasing, web and IT, and science and education, Google's lead were more than 10%.

In summary, Google's search quality is clearly above that of Baidu's though the lead was not overwhelming.

The figure shows graded test results. From B1 stands slightly favors Baidu to B3 strongly favors Baidu. And from G1 slightly favors Google to G3 strongly favors Google.

Lu quit CNNIC last year and started his own company China Intelliconsulting Corp or CIC. He indicated that to ensure the fairness of the test, the state sponsored Artificial Intelligence Lab in Qinghua University were inivited and participated in the survey.