Seeking innovation and change is one of the characteristics of the Internet industry, so "its rise and fall, its death is also sudden" has become the norm of Internet products, and "longevity" products are far more rare than giant pandas. When these "giant pandas" are mentioned, people often think of QQ, Taobao, in fact, there is a product that people often use but is easy to ignore: Baidu Encyclopedia.
Baidu Encyclopedia has been born for 15 years, and among the many product lines launched by Baidu, it is only later than Baidu Know and Baidu Tieba. In the PC Internet era, Encyclopedia is one of Baidu's most important businesses, which can make up for the shortcomings of search engines in content search, while leaving users in the site as much as possible. To this day, encyclopedia products are still one of the important channels for people to obtain information, in turn, from the perspective of people/ institutions / enterprises, Baidu encyclopedia entries have become one of the identity IDs of Zhang Xiaolong to a certain extent, and are the most important business cards on the Internet.
As mentioned earlier, Baidu Encyclopedia is slightly lonely, and it seems that The track of Baidu Encyclopedia is too calm. Baidu Encyclopedia's dominant position in the Encyclopedia Track is even more obvious than ThatChat's social networking field for acquaintances. ByteDance acquired Interactive Encyclopedia in 2019 and began to build its own search ecology, and Only a few splashes splashed in the pond of Encyclopedia, which briefly attracted people's attention.
However, calm water surfaces are often an illusion. Acquaintance social networking has long been unified by WeChat, but the changes in WeChat are so great that even Zhang Xiaolong was difficult to predict at the beginning of its founding. The same is true of QQ and Taobao. As one of the representatives of longevity products, Baidu Encyclopedia is the same, and there is only one immortal medicine for Internet products, that is, internal continuous innovation and change. In the past ten years, Baidu Encyclopedia has evolved from an early knowledge ecology based on graphics and texts to a content product that integrates video, audio, VR, AR and other media, becoming one of the infrastructures of the Internet knowledge track.
The secret of becoming a "giant panda" is actually very simple: changxin can live a long life, and longevity must be always new.
A
In March 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of the portal Bomis, launched an online encyclopedia project, Nupedia, the predecessor of Wikipedia.
In Wales' vision, Nupedia should be like a traditional encyclopedia, with all entries reviewed by experts in various fields before they can be published, but this move is not in line with the open, shared nature of the early Internet age.
Because of this, Nupedia was slow in its early years, with reports of publishing only 21 entries in its first year. By the time Nupedia closed the site in 2003, the platform had published only 25 entries, with 74 entries still in the pipeline.
Wikipedia was originally launched as Nupedia's "side story" project, which was more open and accepted by the public, but it was a great success. Within the first month of its launch, Wikipedia received more than 1,000 English entries, surpassing 40,000 in the second year.
Chinese Internet encyclopedia product appeared shortly after the success of Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia successfully made search companies aware of the strategic significance of this product. The search engine itself only assumes the role of information entrance, but with the layout of the content field, it can keep users within its own ecology and extend the user's stay in the site as long as possible.
This is also why, in addition to searching, Baidu has also launched a series of content products such as know, Tieba and Wenku.
However, unlike other content products, Encyclopedia naturally has a certain public attribute, all entries are contributed by users, written and reviewed by users, and the content of entries must also uphold the principle of neutrality and objectivity.
At the beginning of this year, Zhang Xiaolong pointed out that he hoped that the WeChat video number could become the official website of each institution. In fact, wikipedia products have been playing a similar role.
Just look at your search habits. When you want to learn about a well-known person, a company, or just a noun that you don't understand, open a search engine, and the first page you click into is often Wikipedia. In the vast sea of information on the Internet, encyclopedia products can often give the most accurate and comprehensive answers, which can meet people's needs for information most quickly.
But this also makes encyclopedia products more and more distant from business, and it is difficult to realize. Wikipedia directly defines itself as a non-profit organization that relies on donations of income to keep itself running every year. Baidu Encyclopedia, 360 Encyclopedia, etc. are attached to platform revenue. Previously, the only independently operated interactive encyclopedia in China was exposed by the CCTV 315 evening party in 2017, and has since plummeted.
Throughout the history of encyclopedia products, it is almost a history of the struggle against disinformation. Every year, encyclopedia products will emerge from large and small information error incidents, and sometimes, encyclopedias will encounter malicious damage from commercial companies.
In 2017, Burger King took advantage of a loophole in Google Assistant that would crawl Wikipedia content in answering the question "What is hamburger" to maliciously tamper with the introduction of burger on Wikipedia and turn it into an advertising slogan for Burger King.
The clothing brand The North Face is even more "chicken thief", they secretly replace the photos in some of the world's scenic spots on Wikipedia with photos of people wearing The North Face. When a user searches for a relevant entry on a search engine, The North Face's conspicuous logo appears at the top of the search results.
These false information and the use of Encyclopedia for commercial publicity have greatly reduced the publicity and neutrality of Encyclopedia products. To this end, each encyclopedia platform has tried to make efforts in the professionalism of content, including forming a more professional editorial team, improving content review, and cooperating with industry organizations.
Taking Baidu Encyclopedia as an example, in 2009, Baidu Encyclopedia launched an authoritative co-construction special activity, joining hands with experts and institutions in various industries to jointly build terms in professional categories; in 2014, under the guidance of the Health Commission, it jointly built an "authoritative medical science popularization network platform"; in 2015, Baidu Encyclopedia and the China Association for Science and Technology reached a cooperation to improve the accuracy of its scientific science popularization terms.
The involvement of professional institutions offsets the non-professional nature of Wikipedia due to popular editing. At the same time, the professional content and editing users accumulated over the years have also become the biggest moat of the current encyclopedia products - latecomers will always face the dilemma of not being able to complete the quantity and quality when they enter the game.
B
In April 2016, 5 months before ByteDance's later phenomenal short video product Douyin was launched, Baidu Encyclopedia quietly launched its own video product - Seconds To Understand Encyclopedia.
That was the eve of the official transformation of the Internet from the age of graphics/voice to the age of video. Also in 2016, Kuaishou broke the circle because of a self-media article "Cruel Underlying Story". It was the fourth-most trafficked mobile app in China at the time, behind WeChat, QQ and Weibo. Although Baidu announced two years ago that it had transformed into a mobile-first Internet company, baidu encyclopedia, a classical knowledge product born in the era of graphics, is still facing a crisis that needs to be transformed.
Wikipedia is a completely graphic content product, the content of a word is often thousands of words, put on the mobile phone screen, several pages can not slide the head. "The encyclopedia content with long pictures and texts is actually no longer able to adapt to the fragmented time needs of users," said a Baidu insider.
At that time, there were few knowledge video-based products on the market, "We are very nervous, can users accept encyclopedic knowledge videos?" At the keynote speech of Baidu Encyclopedia's 15th anniversary, Ruan Yu, vice president of Baidu and general manager of Baidu Encyclopedia, said.
The emergence of the second understanding encyclopedia is a self-evolution of Baidu encyclopedia. In the simple encyclopedia product system, Baidu Encyclopedia is almost invincible, but with the changes in the environment, people's means and needs for access to knowledge are also changing. "Anyone can cut away your needs, the difference is only in what form it takes," said the Baidu insider.
In recent years, various short video platforms have made efforts in the field of pan-knowledge, which also confirms Baidu Encyclopedia's previous judgment.
ByteDance's Douyin and Watermelon Video launched knowledge content projects such as the "100,000 Whys" series of short videos and the "Knowledge Cihai Project" this winter; Bilibili has successively won the big V of knowledge fields such as Half Buddha Immortal and Luo Xiang, and also added the "knowledge" partition; the same graphic and text-based Zhihu has also turned to video in the past two years.
Under the fire of pan-knowledge videos, the second understanding encyclopedia has already explored some achievements. For example, "Understand La" in the field of children's science popularization, "Seconds to Understand the Master's Saying" that invites academicians and other head experts, and "Seconds to Understand the Answer" of the celebrities themselves are all unique content assets. The advance layout in the direction of video not only allows Wikipedia to broaden the dimension of knowledge sharing, but also allows Baidu to win a ticket in the new media era.
In the past few years, they have continuously introduced fresh technologies on the market into the encyclopedia system, such as VR, AR, voice and other media forms.
"Whether it is graphics, video or live broadcast, it is only a form of encyclopedia", the above Baidu insiders said, the core of encyclopedia is to solve the user's curiosity, before it may be text, now it is video, the future metaverse era may also be a more three-dimensional or interactive form. "Its essence has not changed, but the way it is implemented is evolving."
This is also the advantage of Wikipedia compared to other content products, simple Q&A, video, audio and other knowledge products can not be expanded in more dimensions, and Wikipedia can seamlessly graft all kinds of content forms. In other words, wikipedia may become an infrastructure-like presence in the field of knowledge.
C
In April 2021, Shen Ji, executive vice president of Baidu Group, proposed Baidu's "servitization" strategy, that is, to allow users to get WYSIWYG services in every scenario of Baidu's mobile ecosystem.
On the road to service, Baidu Encyclopedia has carried out some exploration and launched the "Encyclopedia Cloud Business Card". To put it simply, unlike the past encyclopedia products that often only display concepts, news and other information, Baidu Cloud Business Card collects many products of Baidu ecology, such as community-based encyclopedia TA, structured encyclopedia star map and service-oriented ticket ordering, e-commerce, which can provide closed-loop services from information retrieval to transaction.
"The original positioning of Encyclopedia is more of a popular science of knowledge, everyone may go away after reading it, and there is no further conversion," the above-mentioned Baidu insider said, "But will users have more needs?" For example, searching for a certain movie, in fact, I want to buy tickets, and I want to see if I can go today after watching the Forbidden City. ”
This is exactly what Wikipedia is trying to do right now. The "Encyclopedia Cloud Business Card" is equivalent to "mini program" of the encyclopedia, transforming it from the entrance of knowledge into the entrance of service. For example, when you search for "Forbidden City" on the mobile terminal, the "Forbidden City Cloud Business Card" that pops up integrates a variety of services such as ticket purchase, explanation, note-taking and encyclopedia, which can meet the needs of users in one stop.
The advent of services has broadened the imagination of Wikipedia. Originally, Wikipedia was only a content product attached to the Baidu ecosystem, but after realizing the closed loop of transactions, it evolved from connected knowledge to connected services, and there are more possibilities.
From this perspective, what Baidu is doing is similar to WeChat, and they are trying to build a new ecosystem within the product system.
China's Internet development has been more than 20 years, and many classical Internet products have gradually faded out of people's vision. Baidu Encyclopedia has been around for 15 years now, but now it seems hard to define it with the term "encyclopedia."
There are no old products, only products that do not progress. Longevity products are often underestimated, but the kernel that contributes to its longevity has not changed.
We can see many examples from history, such as QQ, which has been mainly young in recent years, and has embarked on a new path of differentiation under the siege of instant social products such as WeChat; Taobao, which has carried out mobile transformation early, has smoothly transitioned from the PC era to the mobile era.
Longevity is bound to be constantly new. Only by actively embracing the changes of the times and taking the initiative to seek changes can we resist the passage of time.