What 's so great about Baidu?

From a user perspective :

• It is by far the best option to find any practical answer about something that is in China. About politics / history do check http://google.co.hk though ;)
• It is 10 times faster and 100 times more reliable than Google within mainland China (Google works less than 1/3 of a time recently)
• The Baidu groups 百度知道 are a golden mine for tips that makes one ‘s life  easier : recipes, opening hours, transportation, etc.
• Baidu Groups will even provide you with things like direct download links for softwares and activation keys - for outlaws only, of course.
• You can find entire movies and TV serials just by looking up their names on Baidu Video
• A lot of free music on Baidu Music as well, with links to direct download from deep web FTP scanning. They even provide a desktop player 千千静听 with the lyrics for a karaoke training at home.
• The search engine can be used as a dictionary as it offers directly Chinese translation for any English word you look up
• It is the most crappy search engine ever when it comes to find something in a Western language
• As Ajeet Gupta said, Baidu is absolutely ubiquitous on the Chinese Web. You can do everything from browsing to paying using Baidu ‘s products. Just have a look at Baidu ‘s product list : 百度产品大全
• Their Chinese language input system for Android is just great

This text was originally published in quora.