Billsdue has a good series on Baidu’s IPO. The IPO will be a blockbuster no doubt, it is already the sixth most visited internet site in the world.

However, one of the main concerns of the IPO is that about 20% of searches on Baidu is related to pirated music and how RIAA will respond to the threat. Beyond simply allowing searchers to look for a certain file formats, Baidu has tailored the mp3.baidu.com search experience expressly for music pirates lovers. While from a legal angle it is certainly problematic (to the extend its “aiding and abetting” not just “unintended use”), from the product angle, its a perfect case study of what product strategy to pursue for vertical search engines by going far far beyond just returning a list of ranked search results.

Quoting Luise Monier,

But since I have the mike in hand, what I find the most interesting problem in search is to think of it as a dialog rather than a one-shot thing: enter query, get ten links back. The search engine needs to do its part to keep the dialog going. That’s what I said at Web 2.0 last year.

I believe this is especially the case for vertical search engines of which users have higher expectation on recall & precision. Under such higher expectation of “quality & relevance” it is much harder to create algorithms which will predict the intention of the end user. As a result, vertical search engines must put their ego aside regarding asking users for help, certainly hard to do for a generation of information retrieval scientists reared on the Google concept of “black box” = proprietary advantage/coolness, and begin creating an user expressed method for constraining, filtering, and ranking the initial result set. Furthermore, search engines need to give users more relevant data to help users take action on the search results (much more than just a click through), and in Baidu’s case, the download. Even google has learned the new religion. For example, look at how much Froogle’s and eBay’s search experience is becoming a like.

So lets look at Baidu’s search results set. (BTW, check out Jay Chou, he is probably THE Taiwanese/Chinese singer most likely to attempt to cross over to the US.) Beyond the mp3 itself, baidu lets you listen to the song, find the lyric, and download the ringtone. Baidu also has statistics on format, size, and download speed to help users make more intelligent decisions on what to download. And for those into the whole “social search”/Yahoo MyWeb meme, it also has a “Billboard” section of the various top mp3’s ranked by various popularity methods/scores.

Its no accident that MP3’s are 20% of Baidu’s searches. The product is designed in such a way that the crawled results are served up not unlike a “walled gardened” MP3 music download site - with the requisite information richness and user centric design.