Bytedance has revamped a 15-year-old online encyclopedia site under its own brand, expanding the functionalities of its new search engine as it pushes further into the search market.
Why it matters:ย Bytedance’s launch of its own answer to Baiduโs online encyclopedia, Baidu Baike, escalates the rivalry between the rising star and the established search engine giant.
- Baidu Baike and Hudong Baike, or Baike.com, are the two most popular online encyclopedia services in China. Baiduโs offering attracts around 130 million page views per day, and the smaller Baike.com notches around 8.6 million daily page views, according to domain analytics website Alexa.cn.
Details:ย Bytedance has rebranded Baike.com into a site named Toutiao Baike, the online encyclopedia arm of Toutiao Search, the search engine it rolled out in August.
- Toutiao Baike shows on Baike.com’s mobile version, but the desktop version remains the Hudong Baike interface.
- Toutiao Search is a mobile search engine that used to serve as the in-app search function of Bytedanceโs news aggregator Jinri Toutiao.
Context:ย Founded in 2005, Hudong Baike is a for-profit online encyclopedia that focuses on Chinese content.
- The company was listed on Chinaโsย National Equities Exchange and Quotations OTC market in February 2016 but soon had to pause transactions in March 2017 due to low quality and even fake entries. The company eventually decided to delist in August 2018.
- The companyย submittedย a complaint to Chinaโs State Administration for Industry and Commerceย against Baidu in 2011, accusing it of manipulating search results and hiding entries on Baike.com.
- Bytedance owns 22.2% of Baike.com after an RMB 8.1 million (around $1.1 million)ย investmentย into the company in August. The companyย launchedย Toutiao Search in the same month.
- All non-Chinese versions of Wikipedia have beenย blockedย in China since April 2019, and the Chinese language edition has been blocked since 2016.
