Baidu Caught Censoring “CCTV Baidu” Search Results?

Chinese netizens have spotted what looks to be an attempt by Baidu to censor its own search engine to hide news that makes the company look bad. But in such a complex situation where neither side will speak out, it’s impossible to say for sure.

Right now, searching for some keywords related to the recent exposé of alleged fraudulent Baidu promoted links by state-run television CCTV brings up zero results.

For example, entering the names “CCTV” and “Baidu” in Chinese on Baidu.com brings up no results whatsoever (see the above image). This occurs on both the ‘web’ and ‘news’ sections of Baidu’s search engine. All that’s shown is the all-too-familiar, depressing rebuff that all Chinese web users have encountered:

Search results may not comply with relevant laws, regulations, and policies, and have not been displayed.

But, oddly, that censorious sentence is usually reserved for content that authorities want to suppress. However, there appear to have been no media directives to bury this issue. On the contrary, CCTV seems to have been making hay with its attacks on Baidu last week.

The only way to trick Baidu.com into properly searching for the two terms is to enter both of them in English. Searching just for CCTV, in either language, works as normal.

The “CCTV Baidu” search terms in Chinese work fine on every other mainland-based search engine: on Microsoft’s Bing, on Netease’s Youdao.com, on Tencent’s Soso.com, and on Yahoo China as well. Only Baidu seems shy about recent events.

One other possibility is that, actually, Baidu is being put-upon here, and those very particular search results are being gagged by authorities – such as if negative discussions by netizens of CCTV’s coverage were highly visible on the frontpage.

What’s going on here? We’ll keep an open mind for now, and reach out to Baidu to hear what’s happening. Until then, click this link to see Baidu’s utterly blank search results.

[Hat-tip: full credit to Beijing-based William Farris for spotting this and posting it to his G+. Update 8/23 – It has been pointed out that Mr Farris might work for Google, so I’m just adding this for full disclosure. But the essential facts stand.]