Baidu API Overview - ScrapeBadger

Overview

The ScrapeBadger Baidu API turns baidu.com into a clean JSON feed: the web SERP (with language and publish-date filters), the news vertical, image search with full-size image URLs and pixel dimensions, and search-box autocomplete. Baidu is China’s #1 search engine at roughly 60% market share — the single largest search surface outside Google, and the one that decides visibility for the Chinese-language web. It is also the search engine most Western SEO and market-research tooling simply skips.

All endpoints are GET, live under https://scrapebadger.com/v1/baidu/*, and authenticate with the X-API-Key header. Credits are charged per request (see the table below) and reported on the X-Credits-Used response header.

The real URL, not the redirect

Baidu does not link straight to a result. Every organic link is a baidu.com/link?url=... tracking redirect that only resolves to the destination when followed — which is why competing Baidu APIs hand you a baidu.com URL and leave you to make one extra HTTP request per result to learn where it actually goes. ScrapeBadger returns both, on every result:

Field	What it is
`url`	The real target URL, decoded from the result’s `mu` attribute.
`baidu_url`	Baidu’s `baidu.com/link?url=` tracking redirect.

{
  "position": 1,
  "title": "专业咖啡机价格 - 阿里巴巴",
  "url": "https://www.1688.com/jiage/-D7A8D2B5BFA7B7C8BBFA.html",
  "baidu_url": "http://www.baidu.com/link?url=m4_ZyR-m51ZWH--9M5Fnrzn4W0Nebua"
}

So a rank-tracking or domain-visibility job needs one call, not 1 + N — you can group results by real hostname straight out of the response.

Global access, no China proxy

Baidu is reachable from outside China but rate-limits and challenges foreign traffic aggressively. ScrapeBadger absorbs that: requests are served through its own exit pool with session reuse and challenge handling, so you do not need a China-based proxy, a mainland VPS, or an ICP filing. Call the API from anywhere.

Features

Web search — organic results with title, real url, snippet, source (the site name Baidu shows), date/date_at, thumbnail and Baidu’s own tpl template id. Up to 50 results per page.
Language filter — restrict to simplified (zh-cn) or traditional (zh-tw) Chinese, or leave it open with all.
Publish-date window — time_from / time_to as Unix timestamps, mapped onto Baidu’s own gpc date filter.
Related searches — Baidu’s query suggestions from the foot of the SERP, with their SERP URLs, for keyword expansion.
News vertical — articles with publisher, publish date and real article URLs, ordered by relevance or recency.
Image search — full-size image_url (Baidu’s decoded objURL), three Baidu-hosted copies (thumbnail_url, middle_url, hover_url), pixel width/height, format, and the source page (from_url, from_title).
Autocomplete — Baidu’s search-box suggestions for 1 credit, the cheapest way to expand a seed term into real Chinese queries.

Dates

Every dated result ships two fields:

Field	Value
`date`	Baidu’s own string, exactly as rendered — `2026年8月1日`, `3天前`, `2小时前`.
`date_at`	ISO 8601 date (`YYYY-MM-DD`), set only when the raw form is unambiguous.

There is deliberately no timestamp field. Baidu’s SERP carries no time-of-day, so a midnight epoch would be fabricated precision. Sort on date_at and keep date for display.

Credits

Endpoint	Path	Credits
Web search	`GET /v1/baidu/search`	5
News	`GET /v1/baidu/news`	5
Images	`GET /v1/baidu/images`	5
Autocomplete	`GET /v1/baidu/autocomplete`	1

Quickstart

curl "https://scrapebadger.com/v1/baidu/search?query=%E5%92%96%E5%95%A1%E6%9C%BA&num=20" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

import { ScrapeBadger } from "scrapebadger";

const client = new ScrapeBadger({ apiKey: process.env.SCRAPEBADGER_API_KEY });

const results = await client.baidu.search("咖啡机", { num: 20, language: "zh-cn" });
for (const r of results.results) {
  // r.url is the real destination, r.baidu_url the tracking redirect
  console.log(`${r.position}. ${r.title} — ${r.url}`);
}

import asyncio
from scrapebadger import ScrapeBadger

async def main():
    async with ScrapeBadger(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY") as client:
        results = await client.baidu.search("咖啡机", num=20, language="zh-cn")
        for r in results.results:
            print(r.position, r.title, r.url)

asyncio.run(main())

Pagination limits

total_results is Baidu’s own claim (parsed from 百度为您找到相关结果约N个), not a reachable count. Baidu’s SERP stops serving results past roughly page 76 regardless of the total it reports, so page is clamped to 1–76 — a request beyond the wall is rejected rather than billed for a structurally empty page.

num controls page size, 1–50 (Baidu’s own cap). Fewer, bigger pages is the cheaper way to depth: num=50 reaches 500 results in 10 calls.
Page offset is (page - 1) * num, so changing num between pages shifts the window. Keep num fixed for the whole crawl of one query.
Images are a fixed 30 per page, page 1–50.

To go wider than one query’s page wall, expand the seed instead of paging deeper: run /autocomplete (1 credit) and the related_searches off the first SERP, then search each term and merge on url. Cheaper coverage than paging to 76.

Character encoding

Queries are Chinese in practice, so URL-encode the query as UTF-8 and let your HTTP client do it (URLSearchParams, requests params=, the SDKs). Every response is UTF-8; snippet and title come back with Baidu’s own punctuation (,, 、) intact rather than transliterated. Latin queries work too — Baidu serves a mixed SERP for coffee machine — but Chinese terms return meaningfully richer results.

Errors

Status	Meaning
`422`	Anti-bot challenge — not billed. Retry; it succeeds.
`502`	Baidu returned a page without the expected result container. Retry.

Baidu serves a challenge page with HTTP 200. Those are detected by result- container marker, not status code, and surfaced as 422 so a challenge is never billed or mistaken for a genuinely empty SERP.

​Overview

​The real URL, not the redirect

​Global access, no China proxy

​Features

​Dates

​Credits

​Quickstart

​Pagination limits

​Character encoding

​Errors

Overview

The real URL, not the redirect

Global access, no China proxy

Features

Dates

Credits

Quickstart

Pagination limits

Character encoding

Errors