Baidu Japan had 700K visitors in February

[bill]

Despite the oddly worded English in the release it looks like baidu.jp had 713,000 visitors in February. (I assume that's what person-times means.) That's not going to knock Yahoo Japan or Google Japan out of the running, but it's a respectable bit of traffic.

Baidu's Japan-based visitors hit 713,000 person-times in Feb [chinaknowledge.com]

May. 8, 2008 (China Knowledge) - Baidu. Com Inc, the leading Chinese language search engine provider, reported its visitor traffic keeps a fast growing momentum in Japan to reach 713,000 person-times in February 2008, sources reported.

[incrediBILL]

but it's a respectable bit of traffic

Not really, I can rattle off 10 one man web sites that get more traffic off the top of my head including my directory and we don't have to crawl the web to get it ;)

If it can't scale up I'm not sure it's going to be sustainable as you need more visitors than that to attract the sheer volume of advertisers needed to pay a bunch of employees to run a special Japanese language site.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 11:15 pm (utc) on May 10, 2008]

[thaivinhhuy]

I use baidu every day, that is a good SEO

[bill]

BILL, I can certainly relate to that level of traffic...but we're talking about a Chinese startup in Japan.

Culture:
The Japanese and Chinese don't get along all that well. Despite the Chinese character/Kanji exchange there's a bit of innate animosity in play here. A Chinese startup, despite its quality, or backing, comes in with a lot of racist baggage.

Baidu is Chinese. Your average Japanese web surfer thinks that Yahoo is a Japanese company. Perceptions are hard to change.

And, Baidu is actually better at Chinese than Google. It's so good that Chinese people prefer it. I've used it, and the difference is staggering. Baidu has Google beat for relevance in Chinese language SERPs.

Can Baidu Japan do a better job?
The potential is certainly there. Google is a lightweight in Asia for a reason...