In a recent interview with a program sponsored by China’s Toutiao company, Dr. Wu Jun judged that “Baidu has been an ossified company in the past seven or eight years and is now hopeless”.
Wu Jun was a senior engineer in Google and later became vice president of Tencent responsible for its search engine product SOSO. SOSO was closed in two years and then redirects to Tencent’s partner Sogou.com, a competitor of Baidu.
Although Baidu has been widely criticized in China due to its poor quality of search results and utilitarian approaches, it’s still dominant in the Chinese search market. And its only potential major rival Google has recently claimed that it has terminated its “Dragonfly” search engine project for the Chinese market, under pressure posed by the US-China trade war, and this certainly lifted a lot of pressure off Baidu.
It’s rumored that Dr. Wu Jun would become head of Toutiao’s upcoming search engine, which would index content from its popular apps like Douyin and Jinri Toutiao, but that doesn’t seem to be possible as Wu has his own venture capital company in Silicon Valley.