The Moat of Knowledge: How Baidu Baike Secured Victory After Tieba
Key Takeaways
- The highest barrier to entry is not the ability to index information, but the ability to produce exclusive information.
- A great product matrix should be like an ecosystem, where each part can nourish the others, creating a virtuous cycle.
- Incentivizing and guiding users to create content (UGC) is the most central and difficult part of building a community-based product.
Prologue: The "Endgame" of Search
In 2005, Baidu had successfully gone public and was the clear market leader in China. But deep down, Robin Li began to ponder a more fundamental question: What is the "endgame" of a search engine?
Is it just about providing a pile of links and letting users sift through the sand to find gold?
He didn't think so.
"The best search is one that directly presents the most authoritative and accurate answer to the user the moment they ask a question," Li said at an internal product meeting.
This idea was far ahead of its time. To achieve this goal, Baidu could no longer be a passive "information porter"; it had to become an active "knowledge producer."
At the time, the Wikipedia model gave him immense inspiration. The model of global netizens collaborating to create and edit content showed astonishing vitality.
A bold idea took shape in Robin Li's mind: Baidu would also create a "Wikipedia" for the Chinese-speaking world. Not only that, but it would also be deeply integrated with Baidu's existing search and community products to build an unprecedented "content ecosystem."
This idea would later become "Baidu Baike" (Baidu Encyclopedia).
Act I: From "Connecting" to "Creating"
On April 20, 2006, Baidu Baike was officially launched.
Its core philosophy was "everyone is a creator." Any netizen could create, edit, and contribute content to an entry.
The launch of this product marked a profound evolution in Baidu's strategy: from indexing and connecting "existing information" on the internet to incentivizing and organizing users to create "incremental information."
This was a harder, more tiring, and also a greater path.
The core of indexing existing information is technology and algorithms, which was Google's strength. The core of producing incremental information is the understanding and operation of community and human nature, which was Baidu's advantage.
The launch of Baidu Baike formed a perfect strategic synergy with Baidu Tieba, which had been launched three years earlier.
Tieba satisfied users' needs for "finding like-minded people" and "emotional exchange," accumulating a large amount of "soft" content, such as discussions, gossip, and personal experiences.
Baike, on the other hand, satisfied users' needs for "acquiring knowledge" and "authoritative definitions," producing highly structured "hardcore" knowledge.
One was "emotional," the other "rational"; one a "community," the other a "knowledge base."
These two products were like Baidu's two legs, allowing it to stand more firmly on the soil of the Chinese internet than ever before.
Act II: The UGC "Snowball" Effect
The success of Baidu Baike hinged on its clever use of Baidu's search traffic and the immense "desire for expression" of Chinese netizens, successfully kicking off the "snowball" effect of UGC (User-Generated Content).
This virtuous flywheel worked as follows:
- Massive numbers of users search for various keywords on Baidu.
- Baidu displays Baike entries with the highest priority at the top of the search results.
- Users click into a Baike entry and find the content incomplete or incorrect. Driven by a natural human desire to "correct" and "contribute," they proactively edit and improve it.
- After continuous revision by millions of netizens, the Baike entries become increasingly authoritative and rich.
- Higher-quality Baike content attracts more search users, thus starting the next, larger cycle.
Once this flywheel started spinning, its power was astonishing.
In just three years, the number of entries in Baidu Baike surpassed the accumulation of the Chinese Wikipedia over nearly a decade.
More importantly, this content, co-created by millions of Chinese netizens in their own "native language" and "context," was something no foreign competitor could replicate with money and technology in a short time.
It became Baidu's deepest and widest "moat."
Epilogue: The Unassailable Barrier
If MP3 search and Tieba helped Baidu win the "traffic war" with Google, then the success of Baidu Baike helped Baidu win the "endgame" of that war.
When users got used to finding authoritative, accurate, and perfectly suited-to-Chinese-reading-habits answers for "how to cook Sichuan boiled fish" or "what is quantum mechanics" in the first result, they could never go back.
Through the "Baike + Tieba" product combination, Baidu was no longer just a search engine. It became the infrastructure of the Chinese internet world, a huge, self-growing, all-encompassing "knowledge-community" hybrid.
This "content moat," built by hundreds of millions of users, ultimately became an unassailable barrier for Google and remains Baidu's unshakable core competitiveness to this day.
Robin Li's strategic move demonstrated the dual capabilities of a top-tier product manager and strategist. He not only saw the immediate needs of users but also foresaw the ultimate form of future competition, and with great patience and foresight, he planted the most important "seed" that would lock in his victory.