A CCTV report has accused China’s search giant Baidu of allowing fraudulent websites to appear within its promoted links. The report alleges that Baidu’s “Phoenix Nest” advertising system makes little attempt to discern real websites from fraudulent ones, and instead page ranking for promoted sites is decided entirely by how much an advertiser is willing to pay.
We have reached out to Baidu for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
According to the report, the CCTV reporter created two fraudulent websites for non-existent businesses and was easily able to get them both listed in Baidu search results. In once case, a Baidu salesman at their Hebei office even noticed the registration documents were fake, and gave the reporter advice on how they could be made more convincing. After registering two companies via Baidu’s Hebei and Beijing sales offices, the reporter was then able to manipulate which of the two fake companies was listed first in search results by altering the prices each company offered for the ad space. The report additionally alleges that one of the fake companies was charged 513 RMB for its posting, even though it had set its spending limit at 500 RMB and the site is supposed to automatically remove sponsored results as soon as they hit their spending limits.
It’s worth noting that the CCTV report doesn’t seem to offer much detail about how many times the reporter tried unsuccessfully to get fake companies past Baidu’s verification process before succeeding with the two mentioned in the article. And for what it’s worth, a Baidu search for Qunar — a fake version of which was promoted on as the first result on Baidu’s site in June, according to the CCTV report — resulted in the first listing being Qunar.com, the legitimate site. Other searches for popular Chinese websites and brands that we tried did not seem to return any fraudulent promoted results. We tried: Taobao, QQtuangou, Sina, Lashou, ctrip, Alibaba, Tencent, Youku, Nokia, iPhone, BMW, Joyo, KFC, Ikea; some generic searches like “train tickets”, “plane tickets”, “TVs”, “cell phones”, “washing machines”, “movie theaters”, and all of Baidu’s top ten overall search terms. Many of those searches did return some promoted results, but none of these appeared to fraudulent (although admittedly we have no way of checking their registration).
We’re not the only ones who are a bit skeptical of this report. Some analysts are already suggesting that the critical piece proves only that one Baidu employee broke internal controls that do exist at Baidu, and that the whole thing is essentially an attempt to distract viewer attention from larger social problems faced by the government.
So is Baidu really making it easy for fraudulent sites to get promoted? On one hand, CCTV’s report is pretty damning. On the other hand, our own little investigation didn’t seem to indicate that fraudulent sites are very widespread at the moment, at least among promoted links. And we’ve already heard suspicions of ulterior motives on CCTV’s part from several sources.
It’s also worth noting that this is not the first time this has happened. Back in 2008, CCTV ran a similar report about several search websites’ paid advertising platforms, implicating both Baidu and then-rival Google. In response, Baidu suspended a number of fraudulent advertisers and also “initiated dialogue” with CCTV over the issue (h/t @niubi). CCTV ran another expose in July 2010, again reporting that Baidu advertisers in paid search results were selling fraudulent goods.
[CCTV via Beijing News (新京报)]
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