Search Engine Baidu and the healthcare incident
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-baidu-regulations/china-curbs-baidu-healthcare-ads-business-after-students-death-idUSKCN0Y014U
Search engines’ revenue reply heavily on advertisements. For Baidu, the largest search engine company in China, its 20%-30% of revenue comes from healthcare companies. Baidu uses an auction method to select what companies are featured at the top of search results: basically, whichever company pays the highest can be the first search result when people search for hospitals or certain health care products. They don’t do much due diligence on these companies but focus on the profits these companies can bring. The government decided to regulate Baidu’s strategy after an accident aggravated. A young student accused Baidu of promoting false medical information when he was looking for treatments before his death. Many other victims with similar experience also reacted fiercely and asked Baidu for compensation and change in strategy. The government then conducted an investigation on Baidu.
This reminds me of our class material regarding the difficulty in ranking search results on the web. There is a diverse authoring body, including children, novice, and experts, so it is hard to rank documents based on one standard. Anyone nowadays can create a web page with productive information. It is indeed hard for Baidu to know that which results should be ranked higher than others. However, they do need to take into accounts more criteria apart from bid price. Search engines do in fact facilitates people’s life by providing them with answers that they need, but it also lowers the threshold for content creators, because anyone can make things up that seems expert and real. It is hard to filter the millions of information that you need. It is part of Baidu’s responsibility to be more careful in search rankings, but the responsibility is also on anyone who tries to create meaningful contents or retrieve useful information on the web that helps them.