Advertisement
Baidu vs Google: 2019’s searches inside and outside China’s Great Firewall
From Notre Dame and Avengers: Endgame to 996 and The Wandering Earth, the most-searched keywords on Google and Baidu this year look very different
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
This article originally appeared on ABACUS
From Baby Yoda to the US-China trade war, everyone has their own favourite and least favourite moments of 2019. But if there’s one thing that unites us, it’s that we searched for these moments online.
Advertisement
Each year Google publishes a list of the 10 most-searched keywords of the year. Since Google is the world’s most prevalent search engine, it’s a useful proxy for what piqued the world’s interest over the last 12 months. But China doesn’t have access to Google. So home-grown Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, has its own list.
Here’s what people searched for on both sides of the Great Firewall in 2019.
The big events
“May you live in interesting times” goes the apocryphal curse said to originate in China (but probably doesn’t). And 2019 was certainly interesting for China, especially given the on-going anti-government protests in Hong Kong that are now in their seventh month.
However, thanks to the Great Firewall, the protests weren’t the most-searched term on Baidu. Instead, the top spot went to the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. (On Google, the most-searched term in the world was about cricket matches between India and South Africa, while in the US people were most interested in Disney+.)
The story of China’s Great Firewall, the world’s most sophisticated censorship system
Other trending events were sadly not as exuberant. The same month the Notre Dame fire became the most Googled search term in the world, China was fighting its own fire that ended even more tragically. The Sichuan forest fire left 30 dead, making it one of the most-searched events on Baidu.
Tech was as big as ever
The iPhone 11 is the only tech product that was Googled enough to make it a top 10 search globally. But it didn’t make the cut in China. Maybe it’s because Chinese netizens thought it was ugly.
Advertisement