A preview of Baidu.com's upcoming redesigned frontpage.
Today at its Baidu World conference in Beijing, China’s biggest search engine is showing off a redesigned Baidu.com homepage that opens it up to third-party developers’ web apps.
The revamped Baidu frontage isn’t live yet, but we have a screenshot (above) courtesy of the Chinese site Techweb. It’s the second piece of big news out of Baidu World today, after we earlier took a look at Baidu’s new Android-based mobile OS.
Unveiling the new-look homepage this morning, Baidu CO Robin Li said that it means “every developer can get on the Baidu homepage.” It won’t be the first time that the company has worked with third-party developers. Baidu’s search mechanism already uses its ‘box computing’ platform that triggers interactive widgets on the search results page for certain semantic terms. Those widgets are made by dozens of developers, and feature things such as Douban’s music player or Qiyi’s TV show finder. It looks likely that the same expertise will inform what appears on the redesigned Baidu.com.
A look at the screenshot above shows that partners on-board already include group buy site Meituan and Groupon’s China site, Gaopeng.
Here’s another view of the new homepage from the official Baidu World Sina Weibo account. Pictured is Robin Li:
Another feature will be greater user customization of the homepage, so that being logged in with a Baidu account will give a personalized Baidu.com that’s more relevant to you. Using multiple accounts – say, one for work and one for home – will thereby allow you to tailor the revamped Baidu.com to your needs.
It’s interesting to see Baidu make this move. It’s certainly not going towards the (over-cluttered?) way of Yahoo with its portal-like homepage, but it’s also moving away from Google’s very basic style. We’ll let you know when it goes live.
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