I reckon it's not fair to compare Xiao Mi with Baidu, baidu is an evil company with evil history, they sort the search results based on how much clients would like to pay, similar with AdSense, but the ad supported results are blended with normal search results without indication. A year back they even publish fake medicines in search results.
Baidu no longer a startup company, they control the search engine market in china, ordinary people don't have the concept of search engine, baidu it is...
I don't think that evil at all. I think people use that word way to fast. Killing people is evil. Lieing is evil. As long as they are open about it, which they seem to be, I think it's perfectly okay. Maybe if someone is willing to pay, that's often even a better indication of relevance then some random metric on links.
I also think there was also a study about Google, which found that many people can not tell apart ads and normal results.
I was using Xiao Mi as an example of a great Android product from China rather than a comparison to Baidu (though I didn't know about Baidu's search result practices).
My question still stands though, is it much more of an Android "fork" as what the modifications that Xiao Mi is making?
This is one of the story: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/08/16/baidu-slid...
Baidu no longer a startup company, they control the search engine market in china, ordinary people don't have the concept of search engine, baidu it is...