China Searches For Answers To Questions About Baidu’s (BIDU) Reliance On Healthcare Ads

The death of a student after an experimental cancer treatment he found through China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, has exposed the fault lines in the company’s business model, which relies heavily on income from the country’s lightly regulated health sector. Before his death, student Wei Zexi, 21, criticized the military-run hospital that provided the failed treatment for misleading claims about its effectiveness and accused Baidu, which controls 80 percent of the Chinese search market, of promoting false medical information.