Kaiser Kuo by Fantake via FlickrCelebrity speaker, rock musician and internet watcher Kaiser Kuo has today joined China’s largest search engine Baidu as their director international media relations. The news broke late last night through Twitter, a micro messaging service blocked in China. Kuo will report directly to Baidu’s CFO Li Xin Zhe.
Baidu became a quasi-monopolist on the search market in China, after Google withdrew earlier this year from the market. Baidu has already been a market leader almost since its start in 2000. The search engine mostly focuses on the Chinese market, although it tried to have minor inroads into Japan too.
While the exact function of Kaiser Kuo inside the company is still undisclosed, the NASDAQ-listed company got more than once international attention, but mostly ignored any media upheaval about the search engine. Not surprisingly, it does censor its search results according to the political requirements of the day. Also, part of its popularity derives from the availability of illegal mp3-files for music. Baidu also combined its paid searches with other searches, without making a distinctions.
While those issues came up in the international media, most of the Chinese internet users did not seem to be bothered by either of them.
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Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him or any of our other internet watchers at your conference, do get in touch.
