Baidu has redesigned its search box twice before without removing the step that made it valuable. The third attempt is aimed at exactly that step.
One task, one delivery
At a product upgrade briefing in Beijing on 30 October, the manager of Baidu’s new search product described the change as moving from a single question and a single answer to a single task and a single delivery.
In plain terms, the box stops being a place to find things and becomes a place to finish things.
The examples given were specific. A parent searching about school admissions receives a result that combines the child’s scores, the home address and a preference for boarding. A user planning a holiday in Sanya receives an itinerary and a budget, and is notified when hotel prices fall, which in the company’s example saved RMB 2,100 across five nights.
Neither of those is a list of links.
The first two attempts
Baidu brought search to a mass Chinese audience in October 2001, after several years supplying search technology to portals including Sina and Sohu.
In March 2002, users searching on Sina found the results page replaced by a line of red text stating that Sina had not paid and Baidu had stopped service, directing them to Baidu’s own site. The founder later described it as youthful recklessness. It also made the brand known to a public that had not previously encountered it.
The product displaced something specific. Before Baidu, the most used reference for Chinese users was a thick printed directory of enterprises. Hyperlink analysis made that object obsolete and gave Baidu a position it held for a decade.
The first redesign came in 2011, when Baidu launched a new homepage under the slogan one person, one world. Navigation alerts, live trends, applications and a news feed were placed beneath the box, and logged-in users saw personalised content. The intent was to convert the box from an input field into an entry point for personal services.
The reason was competitive. Social platforms were absorbing time that had previously belonged to search. Xiaohongshu, founded in 2013, became the largest threat to Baidu search before large language models arrived, because users spent their attention browsing what other people said rather than searching for it. The box was still used, but the session ended sooner.
The second redesign came in 2017 after Lu Qi joined, when Baidu set its main channel as AI and information feed.
Why the third attempt is different
The previous two changes added surfaces around the box. Neither removed the sequence of typing, reading a list and clicking a link.
Removing that sequence changes the economics of the page. Advertising attached to a list of links is a mature inventory with predictable and slowly declining yield per session. Advertising attached to a completed task is closer to a transaction, which supports different pricing and a different sales motion.
It also changes who loses. If the platform completes the task internally, the sites that previously supplied the underlying information lose the visits that funded them, and the advertising inventory that depended on those visits is no longer created.
Baidu’s framing is defensive as much as offensive. The stated risk of not changing is becoming a corporate directory for the AI era, which is the same object Baidu itself displaced 26 years ago.
The test
Whether this works depends on whether task completion holds up outside the demonstration cases. Travel planning and school admissions are structured problems with retrievable inputs. Most search intent is less well specified, and a delivered answer that is wrong costs more trust than a list that is merely unhelpful.
The search box has survived for 26 years because the gesture was stable and the user stayed in control of the last step. The third redesign asks users to give up that step in exchange for completion.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original 36Kr report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://36kr.com/p/4060419503921026.