What Is Baidu.com?
Headquartered in Beijing’s Haidian District, Baidu (baidu.com) is a Chinese multinational technology company. Baidu was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, as a search engine platform specializing in internet-related services, artificial intelligence (AI), and diverse products. Baidu is one of the leading AI companies in the world, offering a full and diversified portfolio of AI services such as AI chips, deep learning framework, Core AI capabilities as well as an open AI platform to promote its application and use. Baidu.com stands as the fourth largest search engine in the world, coming in behind Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ 100 index in 2005 and as of late 2021, Baidu held a market cap of USD 70 billion.
As of February 2023, baidu.com gets an estimated 4.6 billion monthly views according to Similarweb. The Wayback Machines provides June 6, 2000 as the approximate date of conception for baidu.com. Traffic has been regurlary increasing for the site, with the most traffic picking up between 2016 and 2019.
Website: https://www.baidu.com/
Is Baidu.com Safe?
I conducted a series of malware tests to find out if baidu.com is safe and legit. Here are the results:
I installed the Malwarebytes Browser Guard on my Edge browser and was able to browse the site baidu.com without any issues.
To check this further I ran malware scans with Malwarebytes and Spybot on my computer after browsing the site baidu.com and they returned no malware detection. I also ran a system-wide scan with Microsoft Defender and no malware was found.
To try to confirm that the site is clean, I also checked the site baidu.com on the online malware scanner Sucuri and it returned as a medium security risk. You can see the same here: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/https/www.baidu.com
Sucuri graded the site baidu.com as a medium security risk due to a TLS recommendation as follows:
No redirect from HTTP to HTTPS found. You should redirect your website visitors to the HTTPS version to avoid the “Not Secure” browser warning.
Some hardening improvements can be made by solving the missing security headers and obsolete PTR mechanism listed below:
Missing security header for ClickJacking Protection. Alternatively, you can use Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors ‘none’.
Missing security header to prevent Content Type sniffing.
Missing Strict-Transport-Security security header. Affected pages:
https://www.baidu.com/404javascript.js
https://www.baidu.com/404testpage4525d2fdcMissing Content-Security-Policy directive. We recommend to add the following CSP directives (you can use default-src if all values are the same): script-src, object-src, base-uri, frame-src
Obsolete PTR mechanism found in your SPF record. Please review your DNS records to correct the problem: ptr.
However, as a positive prospect, Sucuri found no malware during its scan and the site is not blacklisted by any of the 9 blacklists checked. Further, Sucuri shows that baidu.com has a website firewall in place to provide protection against website hacks.
I also ran a parasite scan with Unmask Parasites on the site baidu.com and it states that the page seems to be clean. You can see the same here: https://unmask.sucuri.net/security-report/?page=baidu.com
Lastly, I ran a malware scan with VirusTotal on the domain baidu.com and none of the 89 security vendors have flagged the domain as malicious. You can see the same here: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/baidu.com
In conclusion, the domain baidu.com is a medium security risk according to Sucuri because of a TLS recommendation but no malware was found during its scan. No vendors associated with Sucuri and VirusTotal have blacklisted the site baidu.com or deemed it as malicious.