Baidu is the Fastest Major Web Site in China

LEXINGTON, Mass., July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Chinese-language search giant Baidu.com Inc. is the fastest of China's 50 most popular Internet sites, according to a first-ever public performance ranking prepared by Gomez Inc.

The ranking, published July 20 in the 150,000-circulation China Internet Weekly magazine, scores the sites by response time, availability and consistency as measured by Gomez throughout June. These variables largely determine the quality of the user experience.

Baidu had the lowest response time in the "Gomez Top Traffic Sites User Experience" benchmark at 0.7 seconds. Updated benchmarks will appear every month in China Internet Weekly, and benchmarks tracking the performance of China's online banking, e-commerce and other vertical markets will follow.

"Benchmarking is especially important in China given our enormous web user population of 162 million, our expansive geography and our rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, which are fragmenting control of the user experience," said Yuan Cheng, general manager of Gomez China Operations. "Gomez benchmarks provide essential guidance to companies that want to know how they are performing relative to other companies and competitors, and how they can improve the web experiences they deliver. Baidu's performance, as affirmed in the benchmark, helps explain its monumental success."

Baidu is the most-visited site in China and number one in online ad revenue.

Gomez, the leader in web application experience management, performs similar benchmarks in the US, including private ones for clients. The company opened a full-service office in Beijing exactly one year ago to serve the Asia Pacific region, including international companies establishing a new presence there. The operation, which initially focused on development and customer service, has recently started sales there and closed new customers in June.

In addition to public and private benchmarks, Gomez offers a set of on- demand services that enable companies to design, develop, validate, deploy, operate, analyze and improve web application experiences. It's called the Gomez ExperienceFirst(TM) Platform.

About Gomez

Gomez is the leading provider of on-demand web application experience management solutions, helping the world's top businesses ensure quality web experiences for their customers. Gomez ExperienceFirst applications are used by more than 1,500 companies worldwide, including eight of the top 10 most visited sites, six of the top 10 retailers, nine of the top 10 financial services firms, five of the top 10 social networking companies, and four of the top 10 industrial companies. Founded in 1997, Gomez provides the industry's only complete solution for managing web application experience from development through deployment and the entire application life cycle, featuring active monitoring, competitive benchmarking, and more than 15,000 data sources worldwide. Gomez is Network Computing magazine's "Editor's Choice" for best Internet performance monitoring service. For more information, please visit http://www.gomez.com/

Gomez, Gomez.com and Gomez ExperienceFirst network are trademarks and/or service marks of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.