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baidu

Quick start

Run your first baidu command.

# Hot search board in rank order (table at TTY, JSONL piped)
baidu hot

# Top 10 movie searches
baidu hot --tab movie -n 10

# Output as JSON
baidu hot -o json

# Just the URLs
baidu hot -o url

Suggest

The query is positional now.

baidu suggest golang
baidu suggest "machine learning" -o json

baidu search golang
baidu search golang --pages 2 -o json

search is walled behind a CAPTCHA. From a datacenter or flagged IP it bounces and the command exits cleanly (exit code 5) with a hint to pass a real --baiduid cookie. A real BAIDUID improves the odds but is not guaranteed.

Baike encyclopedia

# One article by title, id, or title/id
baidu article 北京

# Lemma stubs under a category tag (empty tag walks the built-in tags)
baidu categories 科技

article and categories read the Baike encyclopedia, which is geo-walled. They answer fully from China IPs and return blocks from elsewhere; off a China IP they exit cleanly (exit 5 when blocked, exit 3 when genuinely empty) rather than faking data.

Mirror Baike locally

The mirror is a CLI-only, resumable crawl of Baike into a local SQLite store.

baidu seed topics          # queue the built-in seed topics
baidu crawl                # work the queue with a worker pool
baidu export --markdown    # write mirrored articles as Markdown
baidu info                 # mirror location, counts, disk usage

The crawler depends on Baike being reachable, so from a non-China IP crawl records each fetch as blocked rather than producing records.

Serve over HTTP or MCP

baidu serve                # HTTP, NDJSON; /healthz and /v1/openapi.json
baidu mcp                  # MCP server over stdio

Pipe to jq

baidu hot | jq '.word'
baidu suggest weather | jq '.word'
2 min read