Search engine company Baidu recently sued an operator of advertising website for unfair competition, as the website created fake clicks to interfere with the search engine algorithm and improve its natural search ranking. Recently, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court made a second-instance judgment on the case, ruling that the company’s behavior constituted unfair competition, and ordered it to stop the unfair competition, eliminate the impact, and compensate Baidu for economic losses of 2 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 50,000 yuan.

According to Baidu, the defendant company is the operator of an advertising task website. The company set up an advertising task publishing platform to help and guide the traffic demanders to publish tasks, and used “profit” as a bait to induce the “task takers” to disguise themselves as normal users and create fake clicks, to meet the needs of the “task publishers”, interfere with the search engine algorithm, and improve the natural search ranking.

Baidu claimed that the company’s behavior constituted unfair competition, and requested the court to order the company to stop the unfair competition, eliminate the impact, and compensate it for economic losses and reasonable expenses of 5 million yuan.

The court of first instance ruled that the defendant company’s behavior constituted unfair competition, and ordered the company to stop the unfair competition, eliminate the impact, and compensate Baidu for economic losses of 2 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 50,000 yuan. After the verdict, the defendant company appealed to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court.

In the end, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court ruled that the defendant company’s behavior constituted unfair competition, and rejected the appeal, upholding the original judgment.