Bear Paw Account was the No.1 star product of Baidu in 2018, which was desperately promoted by Baidu via all ways. But its name suddenly disappeared from its official webpage on December 29th, 2018.
This surprising change is confusing countless Chinese website owners, and Baidu hasn’t officially confirmed this yet. On the same day of this change, it was rumored that Baidu’s work team of Bear Paw Account had been dismissed.
On the same page appears a new name called “Bear Paw ID”, and beneath it are banners of two other products: Mini Program Platform and Baijia Account.
This transformation from “account” to “ID” apparently means Bear Paw account has been abandoned by Baidu, and its only left function is to be as an identification of website owners.
The so called “Mini Program Platform” is just a similar step after Tencent and Alibaba, who released “Mini Program” successively in the past two years, but Baidu’s “mini program” is boasted to be connected with Baidu AI, a major business direction of today’s Baidu.
The other “Baijia Account” is just a post release platform similar to WeChat Official Account but is far less popular in China.
We questioned Baidu’s strategy and story on “Bear Paw Account” in multiple posts here on Jinray’s company blog, like this article about Bear Paw Account and Whitehat SEO, but even we didn’t imagine that this product could be ended in such an unexpected way.