Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

Baidu is quite well known in China as being the place to get free mp3s by just searching for songs at mp3.baidu.com and then downloading the song from the respective website. Now, this can be done still in Google with some advanced search commands (eg: filetype:mp3 aerosmith), but what could be done for Baidu specifically?

Just two weeks after Baidu Hi launched its public beta test, Baidu announced on yesterday that over 1 million users has tried Baidu Hi. An IM service from Baidu will definitely attracts users’ attention, similar to Google’s GTalk. The real challenge is how many percentage of registered users will remain active six month later.

"The plaintiffs include Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, and they are suing Alibaba, which runs Yahoo China, for a total of RMB5.5 million for their combined economic losses," says China CRS. "They are also asking Alibaba to stop having Yahoo China infringe on their copyrights."

Lost Laowai author Steven sums up the differences between search giant Google and its Chinese thorn, Baidu using a parody on the Mac/PC commercials.

Anyone that tried to access Google, Yahoo and probably some other search engines the other day was likely scratching their heads as their browser got auto-directed to Baidu. Hacker prank or bad business ethics?

Baidu issues full statement denying censoring negative search results related to Sanlu and the melamine milk powder incident. Chinese netizens remain skeptical.

Baidu reported that the number of Chinese bloggers, that is blogs written in Chinese has hit 19.87 million.

That's a 24% jump over November last year.

The average blogger updated their blog every

Here’s one of the areas where Baidu is actually behind in its own market comparative to Google (unlike my previous post on how Google is so far behind in understanding China and in localizing the Chinese market).

Over 70 Chinese babies have developed kidney stones due to all drinking the same Sanlu brand milk powder. Sanlu blames counterfeiters, Chinese citizens outraged. Government blamed for failure to act. Baidu suspected to be involved in censoring negative news.