Baidu is the dominant search engine in China, and Baidu News is a critical source for understanding media coverage, brand sentiment, and trending topics in the Chinese market. However, scraping Baidu directly is notoriously difficult due to aggressive bot detection, regional constraints, and frequent HTML changes.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to scrape Baidu News using SerpApi.

Why Use SerpApi To Scrape News From Baidu

If you’ve tried scraping Baidu directly, you’ve likely run into issues such as a dynamic HTML, frequent layout changes, javaScript-rendered elements, Chinese - specific quirks (encodings, redirects, tracking parameters). For production use cases, brand monitoring, market research, competitive intelligence, DIY scraping quickly becomes impractical.

That’s where SerpApi’s Baidu News API comes in. It's a structured API, which returns a clean JSON response. SerpApi manages the intricacies of scraping and returns structured JSON results. This allows you to save time and effort by avoiding the need to build your own Baidu scraper using generic web scraping frameworks like BeautifulSoup which require constant maintenance. We do all the work to maintain all of our parsers and adapt them to respond to changes on search engines. By taking care of this for you on our side, we eliminate a lot of time and complexity from your workflow.

About Baidu News API

Baidu News API returns structured news data from Baidu News pages. The API returns structured fields such as title, link, source, date, and snippet.

At a minimum, you need the following parameters:

  • engine - set to baidu_news
  • q (search query) - set to your query
  • api_key - set to your private API key

Here is an example of the information the API scrapes:

Get results using a simple GET request

https://serpapi.com/search.json?engine=baidu_news&q=Artificial+Intelligence&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY

This request searches the Baidu News search engine for Artificial Intelligence and provides JSON results. Try it out on our playground:

SerpApi Playground - SerpApi
Test SerpApi’s Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Bing, Walmart, eBay, Baidu, Yandex and more APIs for free in the interactive playground!
SerpApiSerpApi

An Example Use Case

Let's write some code to extract Baidu News results for Phones and write them to a CSV.

Setup your environment

Ensure you have the necessary libraries installed.

pip install google-search-results
google-search-results is our Python library. You can use this library to scrape search results from any of SerpApi's APIs.

More About Our Python Libraries

We have two separate Python libraries serpapi and google-search-results, and both work perfectly fine. However, serpapi is a new one, and all the examples you can find on our website are from the old one google-search-results. If you'd like to use our Python library with all the examples from our website, you should install the google-search-results module instead of serpapi.

For this blog post, I am using google-search-results because all of our documentation references this one.

You may encounter issues if you have both libraries installed at the same time. If you have the old library installed and want to proceed with using our new library, please follow these steps:

  1. Uninstall google-search-results module from your environment.
  2. Make sure that neither serpapi nor google-search-results are installed at that stage.
  3. Install serpapi module, for example with the following command if you're using pip: pip install serpapi

Get your SerpApi API key

To begin scraping data, first, create a free account on serpapi.com. You'll receive 250 free search credits each month to explore the API.

  • Get your SerpApi API Key from this page.
  • [Optional but Recommended] Set your API key in an environment variable, instead of directly pasting it in the code. Refer here to understand more about using environment variables. For this tutorial, I have saved the API key in an environment variable named "SERPAPI_API_KEY" in my .env file.

Using Baidu News API

First, we'll write a simple function to get news results from the Baidu News API:

def get_baidu_news(q):
    params = {
        "engine": "baidu_news",
        "q": q,
        "api_key": os.environ["SERPAPI_API_KEY"],
    }

    results = GoogleSearch(params).get_dict()
    return results.get("organic_results", [])

Writing Results To a CSV

Then, we can write a simple script to call this function and write the news results to CSV:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    q = "Phones"
    output_file = "baidu_news_results.csv"

    header = ["position", "title", "link", "date", "snippet", "source", "thumbnail"]

    with open(output_file, "w", encoding="UTF8", newline="") as f:
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        writer.writerow(header)

        results = get_baidu_news(q)
        for r in results:
            writer.writerow([
                r.get("position", ""),
                r.get("title", ""),
                r.get("link", ""),
                r.get("date", ""),
                r.get("snippet", ""),
                r.get("source", ""),
                r.get("thumbnail", "")
            ])

You can run this script to fetch Baidu News results for the query “Phones.” Then, this creates a CSV file called baidu_news_results.csv and writes a header row that defines each column. You can then call get_baidu_news to retrieve the results and loop through them. For each result, it safely extracts the fields and writes them as rows in the CSV file.

Results

Here's what the results look like:

Adding Localization

Use the ct parameter to control the language of the results returned. Set this when you want to restrict results to a specific Chinese language variant.

  • 1 — All languages (default)
  • 2 — Simplified Chinese
  • 3 — Traditional Chinese

Adding Pagination

Use the pn, rn parameters together to control paging and result count. Use pn and rn together to paginate through large result sets.

Result Offset

  • The pnparameter defines how many results to skip, and is used to move through pages of results.
  • Examples:
    • pn=0 → first page (default)
    • pn=10 → second page
    • pn=20 → third page

Results per Page

  • Use the rn parameter defines the maximum number of results to return. (max: 50)
  • Examples:
    • rn=10 → return 10 results (default)
    • rn=30 → return 30 results
    • rn=50 → return 50 results

A Couple of Advanced Parameters

Sorting the results

The rtt parameter controls how results are ordered. Set this to a particular value when freshness matters more than relevance or vice versa.

  • 1 — Sort by attraction/relevance (default)
  • 4 — Sort by time (most recent first)

Medium Filter

Filters results by content source using the medium parameter. Use this to limit results to specific publisher types or platforms.

  • 0 — No filtering (default)
  • 1 — Only medium-authority sites
  • 2 — Only Baijiahao sources (baijiahao.baidu.com)

All of these parameters are optional, but combining localization, pagination, and filters gives you precise control over the Baidu News results you receive.

Conclusion

Scraping Baidu News directly is fragile and time-consuming. I hope this tutorial helped you understand how to use SerpApi’s Baidu News API to get clean, structured news data with production-ready reliability.

If you’re building anything that depends on Chinese news visibility, this is the fastest and easiest way to get started.

Feel free to reach out to us at contact@serpapi.com for any questions.

Documentation

SerpApi’s Baidu Search API
Following up a brief walkthrough of SerpApi’s Ebay’s Search Engine Results API [https://medium.com/serpapi/serpapis-ebay-search-engine-results-api-3b33fb7aec68] . I wanted to highlight another one of the API’s that are available at our users disposal for SerpApi: Baidu. For those who don’t know, Baidu is the dominant internet
SerpApiJustin O’Hara
Web Scraping in Python (Complete Tutorial 2025)
A fresh guide on how to scrape websites using Python. This is user web scraping 101 with Python.
SerpApiHilman Ramadhan