A BAIDU Map user raised doubts on Sina Weibo over the weekend over the map app’s misleading directions for the Shenzhen Children’s Hospital. Baidu Map responded Sunday night saying the misleading information was due to a technical defect, the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported yesterday.

According to the two snapshots attached to the user’s online post, the Baidu Map app showed the address link of a private hospital that belongs to the “Putian Hospitals.” Hospitals around the country that are funded by Putian businesspeople have largely been accused of providing poor medical treatment and employing an aggressive business approach that spams through search engines.

When the user, who identified himself as a medical staffer with the Shenzhen Children’s Hospital, spotted the link of the private hospital, he felt outraged and suspected that Baidu Map was earning profits by advertising a private hospital in a way that would easily mislead the parents of sick children.

When the snapshots were posted online, some media reports accused the online map company of disrupting search results in order to make profits.

The official Weibo account of Baidu Map later replied to the user under the post and claimed that Biadu had been making efforts to crack down on false advertising and would fix the problem raised by the user.

The online map company made a public response to the media Sunday, attributing the misleading information to a technical problem caused by the disorganization of historical data and that the company had already managed to fix the problem.

The key-word search, location and navigation functions have returned to normal, said the online map. It was announced that the user had been informed about the remedial updates.

To prevent such an incident from happening again, said Baidu Map, the company has screened data from industries related to residents’ livelihoods such as the health industry. Repetitive and similar addresses were checked for misleading information.

In fact, it is not the first time that the map company has been questioned over its search results for hospitals. Media reported last year that when entering “Chengdu No. 2 People’s Hospital” into the search field, not one of the top 10 results on the first page was the actual hospital.

Baidu Map responded at that time that they did not provide promotional deals for companies and search results were shown based on the relevancy of the keywords and the proximity of the destination. (Zhang Qian)