I wonder if the Christianity site on Stack Exchange is visible to internet users in China, particularly through Baidu, the most common search engine in that country.
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I'm not sure if I'm allowed to answer this with the analytics in the mod tools (asking other mods for clarification). Are foreigners able to search baidu?– Peter Turner ModCommented Dec 9, 2019 at 16:45
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@PeterTurner Advertisers (with a registered business address in China or a list of other East Asian countries) advertise on Baidu [Wiki].– Nigel JCommented Dec 9, 2019 at 16:55
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2 Answers
TL;DR: Christianity.SE is basically not accessible in Baidu because Baidu is a Chinese-language search engine. It's accessible using Bing in China. Google is blocked in China.
Hi from Beijing. I'll comment on my search results from within China; I have no VPN or the like.
Is Stack Exchange Christianity seen on the Baidu search engine in China?
Basically, no. For the same reason, Stack Exchange as a whole is not seen on Baidu: Baidu is a Chinese-language search engine.
English sites in general are difficult to discover using Baidu. If we 百度一下 ("Baidu it") say christianity stackexchange, the site comes up as the first hit, but only one link. It's the same for say stack overflow, and chinese stack exchange gives nothing.
(imgur version of the screenshot)
I wonder if the Christianity site on Stack Exchange is visible to internet users in China
It is visible!
If we instead search Bing for christianity stackexchange or site:christianity.stackexchange.com we'll get pages and pages of hits.
(imgur version of the screenshot)
Google is blocked in China, so not many Chinese people use it. Some people use VPNs to get around the block, and they tend to be tech savvy (which probably describes many users of Christianity.SE), but I expect the VPN would result in the traffic not looking like it comes from China.
Imgur is also blocked in China, which significantly reduces functionality. And CAPTCHA (part of Google) is blocked here too, which again makes things hard.
Side note: I note that Christianity.SE (along with bible.com, and many other Christian sites) is blocked in Iran, unlike say Islam.SE. It redirects to a special government page which has links to more Iran-government-preferred sites. [This was correct all three times I've been to Iran.]
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Looking at the analytics (which is available to mods and 25K+ users), it doesn't look like Baidu makes the list of the top reported referrers. That doesn't tell you a ton, but it would seem that we're either blocked or just unpopular.
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2Baidu is also not popular on a SE site I mod, but regardless of that, users in China will have difficulty browsing SE sites in general due to Google being blocked. (ref: Is the Stack Exchange Network blocked in China?, Is Stack Overflow accessible in China?) Commented Dec 9, 2019 at 22:25
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1I think the more remarkable thing here is someone found a use for 25k analytics Commented Dec 18, 2019 at 13:37