This case study details how Baidu Search transformed its Gaokao services by introducing a full‑process personalized companion module, an intuitive volunteer‑selection tool, and an efficient information architecture, resulting in higher user engagement, improved satisfaction, and notable growth in the 2023 exam season.
The guide outlines Baidu Search’s evolution—from early web search to a super‑app with AI‑driven, multi‑modal results—details its four product streams and strategic focus, and maps a product manager’s career from junior to expert, highlighting essential business insight, design, analysis, project leadership, and soft‑skill qualities.
The article surveys Baidu Search’s intelligent question‑answering system, tracing its evolution from feature‑engineered retrieval to large pre‑trained and generative models, and detailing hierarchical readers, multi‑teacher distillation, retrieval‑enhanced generation, and instruction decomposition as key techniques for delivering fast, accurate, citation‑rich answers.
Baidu's search vertical offline computing system evolved through four stages—from a fragmented pre‑2018 processing setup to a unified business framework, then serverless functions, and finally a data‑intelligent architecture with multi‑layer abstraction, graph and multi‑language engines, achieving 5‑10× efficiency gains and dramatically reducing failures.
The Baidu Search Closed‑Door Technical Symposium, the first core technical forum hosted by Baidu’s Search Architecture Department, brings senior engineers and junior backend developers together to discuss semantic retrieval, data‑driven big‑data processing, and vertical search offline architecture, while offering limited‑capacity sessions, networking gifts, and travel subsidies.
This article dissects Baidu Search's ultra‑large micro‑service architecture, detailing the challenges of maintaining five‑nine‑plus availability, the diverse failure modes, and the step‑by‑step evolution of its observability stack—from early log‑only analysis to the kepler1.0/kepler2.0 tracing, full‑log indexing, custom span‑id generation, and compression techniques that together enable rapid root‑cause diagnosis at massive scale.
This article explains how Baidu’s search middle‑platform implements full‑stack observability—metrics, tracing, logs, and topology analysis—to reliably monitor and troubleshoot a system handling billions of requests across hundreds of thousands of microservice instances.
