Research Institute Responds to Bing Overtaking Baidu’s Desktop Market Share in China: Statistics Show Anomalies, Investigation Underway

May 23, 2023 – According to data from the American research institution Statcounter, in April 2023, Microsoft’s Bing search engine surpassed Baidu in terms of market share for desktop searches in China. This news has sparked a heated discussion online.

In response to this, Statcounter’s CEO, Aodhan, stated that there were abnormalities in the statistics of the Chinese search engine market share, and they were currently investigating2.

Statcounter’s data shows that in April 2023, Bing surpassed Baidu in the desktop search market share in China, with Bing accounting for 37.4% and Baidu at 27.01%. However, according to the overall market share data of Chinese search engines for April, Baidu still ranked first with 39.64%, YANDEX ranked second with 21.81%, while Bing and others like Sogou accounted for less than 10%3.

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However, Statcounter’s data for April 2023 shows that in the ranking of market shares for Chinese social media, Facebook ranked first with a market share of 77.99%, Twitter was second with 10.94%, YouTube was third with 6.35%, and Sina Weibo ranked sixth with a market share of 0.23%. Clearly, this data appears to be problematic4.

According to the official website, Statcounter is an American website traffic monitoring agency that provides various types of statistical reports and website traffic statistics services. As reported by the Economic Observer, a person close to Baidu stated that Statcounter tracks statistics through tracking codes on websites. However, many Chinese internet websites and apps do not open their interfaces, so they cannot be counted, which sometimes leads to errors.