BAIDU Inc. is using its own trove of data to measure China’s economy, devising new gauges that may paint a better picture than the government’s.

    The country’s leading search engine has begun using location and search information collected from its more than 600 million users to create indicators and indexes it says could shed light on what’s happening with the world’s second-largest economy.

    As a company that handles 70 to 80 percent of all online searches in China, Baidu amasses enormous quantities of data — information it now wants to put to use commercially and scientifically. The company is among the country’s leaders in artificial intelligence and big data application and it hopes to employ that to further its lead in the domestic Internet arena.

    Baidu’s Big Data Lab will use its tracking of people across the country to help produce new measures of China’s economy. Those include its own employment index, and a consumer spending index that will be issued monthly starting late June or early July alongside additional measures tracking key consumer segments. More advanced versions of the data could be sold to investors willing to pay for that extra edge.

    “Machine-learning algorithms are utilized to identity the employee, consumer and passersby,” senior data scientist Wu Haishan said.

    Starting from simple location data and gradually adding other clues such as search destinations and keywords, Baidu says its data scientists can make pretty accurate estimates about everything from a shopper’s purchasing intent to staffing levels in a factory.

    The Chinese search service handles more than 25 billion location requests from some 700 million users daily, with that data stored on servers, Wu said. While other companies such as e-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and payments network UnionPay run indexes off their own data, Baidu has experience handling valuable information beyond banking and shopping transactions. (SD-Agencies)