Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Baidu Image Search

Asian search competitor Baidu is funny. When you use their image search engine and click on a thumbnail, they’ll open a new page on their server which displays the large version of the image, with an additional link to the source page... an interesting interpretation of “fair use.” (There’s some sort of copyright notice on the page’s footer, though automatic translation programs fail to get the precise point across... part of it sounds like “This picture may be copyrighted.”)

Google also republishes full pages as part of their Google Cache system, or their mobile proxy, by the way. They only show thumbnails of images in their image search though.

On a side-note, Chinese Baidu sometimes finds more results than Google, for example in a search for the Chinese name of former president Deng Xiaoping. Google.cn returns 0 images for this – along with a self-censorship notice – whereas Baidu claims to show 42,700 result images.

On the other hand, Baidu.com is pretty strict when it comes to removing adult images. A search for “sex” returns only 3 (and non-adult) images. But there’s a workaround, as Hong Xiaowan from China notes in the forum: just switch to Japanese Baidu and repeat the search... this time, there’ll be 107,000 images. Xiaowan remarks: “Welcome, Baidu.jp is a sex Baidu.”

[Thanks Xiaowan!]

Baidu Image Search by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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