Maverick China Analyst Blog

Taobao Blocks Baidu's Crawler

On September 9, 2008, Taobao, China's top online market place and e-commerce site announced (Chinese) it will block out Baiduspider, Baidu's (China's largest search engine) crawler. There may be several reasons for this action, one may be a recent statement (Chinese) by Baidu stating its intentions to enter the e-commerce market.

Currently, a sizeable number of Taobao users search for Taobao products on Baidu. Unlike Google, who has complex algorithms put in place to prevent it's search engine to be manipulated by ebay listers, Baidu's algorithms are not so sophisticated and it is easier for TaoBao merchants to get high rankings for their product lisitings on Baidu's main index. Chinese netizens, therefore, have become accustomed to search for their products on Baidu and then follow the search engine links to the appropriate Taobao sales page.

The Alibaba Group may be worried that after Baidu launches its own e-commerce site, users will be more easily led into Baidu's e-commerce site instead of Taobao. Taobao, in effect, is helping cultivate Baidu's e-commerce site if it does not take any action. So Taobao's action is understandable in this respect -- they are trying to get users to go directly to their site to search for products.

I believe the Alibaba Group is starting to regard Baidu as a threat to Taobao and its sister companies' activities, hence the crawler block.