Why Won't Baidu Just Die? A Trending Zhihu Thread Asks Why

A soul-searching question blew up on Zhihu's trending list: "Why is Baidu still breathing if it's so stuck?" — putting the old search giant back in the spotlight, whether it likes it or not.

Plenty of commenters joke that Baidu has missed every party of the past decade — e-commerce, social, food delivery, the works. It plays the homebody who never quite showed up. But peek at its balance sheet and a different picture emerges. Search ads are still a steady cash machine, while Baidu Maps, the Apollo self-driving project, and the Ernie LLM have been quietly leveling up. Now that AI is the hot ticket again, the same old Baidu suddenly looks like a sleeper pick.

Stuck, sure. Dead? Not even close. Whether the next AI wave can really wake this giant up — well, that's a plot twist we're all still waiting to see.