According to Sohu.com's IT channel, the Chinese search engine giant Baidu.com will formally launch the professional edition of its new Internet search engine advertising program, Phoenix Nest, on April 20, 2009.
Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said Phoenix Nest is only an upgraded edition of its former Baidu Bidding Rank.
Prior to this announcement, Baidu changed the name of its Bidding Rank program to Baidu Promotion on March 30, 2009, and the launch of Phoenix Nest is the second step for the development of its Baidu Promotion. According to Baidu's schedule for 2009, the company will formally launch the professional edition of its Baidu Promotion to all clients at the beginning of April 2009; between April and June 2009, it will guide its clients to use the search program; and in June 2009, the company will assist its clients in transforming their files in the classic edition to the professional edition. Then the classic edition will be withdrawn from the market and the professional edition will become the mainstream product for search engine promotion services.
Baidu Bidding Rank is Baidu's advertising product that displays the advertising websites on its search results pages. Though it brought tons of money to Baidu, it has been continuously criticized and brought doubt on its search results ethics from the public. In 2008, Baidu Bidding Rank was exposed by China's CCTV for promoting fake medicine information, which led to the decrease of its share price by up to USD46.9, a drop of 26.22% and a historic low since May 2007. The Phoenix Nest program is a new search engine advertising program of Baidu, which aims to finally replace Baidu Bidding Rank and recover its reputation among Chinese netizens.
We hope it will address many of the deficiencies of the current system. We will see on April 20th how it looks like.
Patrick