eTao: Alibaba’s hypocritical scheme collapses
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In light of the eTao’s unpleasant incident, we’ve largely missed it (including the media) just how blatantly deceitful Alibaba’s call for ‘openness’ is.
The tale begins with the Baidu vs Alibaba row back in 2008. When Baidu, a Chinese web services company that offers several services such as Chinese language search engine for websites, images and audio files, unveiled C2C marketplace You’a (meaning we have) in a botched effort to smash Alibaba’s stranglehold on e-commerce (also a Chinese language site that runs online shopping, such as the eBay, Amazon or Rakuten) reacted by jamming Baidu’s spiders from crawling on its listings, and this still goes on to date.
Then some time in June, eTao was launched, Alibaba’s own shopping search engine; A move to pressure Baidu and hold its losing control over China’s B2C e-commerce market. As we speak, a horde of Chinese e-commerce retailers, including DangDang, 360buy and Suning, have now began actively stopping Etao’s spiders from crawling their websites too. eTao’s fouls for ‘openness’ are preposterously, foolishly insincere.
“Whiny little bitches,” according to Baidu International PR representative Kaiser Kuo who at some point called Alibaba execs. Now you see, what goes around comes around.
A few days ago, 360buy CEO Liu Qiangdong alleged that Etao is ignoring the Robots.txt block– an internationally respected industry standard, although not a technical barrier– still continued to crawl on his site. eTao later responded that it deems ‘product price’ to have openness and will maintain crawling that information.
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group Jack Ma stated that the reason behind Etao was to “ensure Baidu cannot fall asleep” (要让百度睡不着觉). But as you can see from recent lapses, it’s Alibaba and Jack Ma who in turn should have problem sleeping these days, weird eh?
Source: Techrice
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