百度地图 – On China’s Streets with Baidu Maps

Different countries, different customs. It doesn’t always have to be Google. Today I’ll present a possibility to look at addresses in China.

Google Street View is a must-have from OSINT investigators nowadays. Especially when conducting Geolocation Verifications, this tool is a valuable asset. The overall coverage is getting better day by day and in larger cities, such as Paris and London, the Google Street View car has passed multiple times, allowing us to see changes over the years. Even in third world and emerging countries there might be a solid Street View coverage. This effortlessly enables us to have a look at a remote village in Slovakia in order to check an address which supposedly belongs to a large company.

Unfortunately, there are still many blind spots on the Google Street View map. This isn’t Google’s fault and mostly results from regulatory reasons and/or security policies in various countries.

In Germany, the main reason is the complicated relation between Germans and data privacy. Only a few major cities have Street View coverage from 2009 and lots of locations are pixeled. Germany is a digital developing country.

Google Street View coverage for Germany compared with neighboring countries

China also does not have a Street View coverage (except Hong Kong). This has regulatory reasons. However, China wouldn’t be China, if they didn’t have a copy of Street Maps. The Chinese search tool Baidu also incorporates a map tool that has something similar to Street View called Total View. There is no complete coverage in this tool, only in the larger cities and economic centers. Investigators conducting a due diligence of new business partner in China can use Baidu Maps to verify addresses. If the address which is supposed to house a large business only shows a small newspaper kiosk, something might not be right.

Baidu Total View coverage (blue shaded area) in and around Shanghai

The big challenge here is the language barrier. Baidu is in Chinese and the automatic translation of this site sometimes does not work properly, so we’ll have to copy and paste sections of the page to get proper translations.

You can acces the Baidu Maps by clicking on 地图 (this translates to ‘map’) at the top right of the Baidu landing page.

In general, this tool is built like Google Maps. On the top left you’ll see the search field (red box). On the bottom right you can choose between the different view types: Street Map (green box), Satellite View (yellow box) and Total View (purple box).

It is best to search with Chinese search terms when using Baido. So, if we want to search for the address of a Chinese company, we should look up the address in Chinese on the website of the company.

Let us take Volkswagen (China) Investment Co. Ltd. (大众汽车（中国）投资有限公司), for example. This company is a subsidiary of the German automotive group. On the company’s website www.vw.com.cn we’ll find the company name and address in Chinese, of course we have to use Google Translate to get this far.

After copying the Chinese address into the Baidu Maps search, we’ll receive a result. Now we can switch to the Total View mode and place the camera icon right in front of the address.

Just like Google Street View, we now have to possibility to pitch and turn the camera, as well as zoomin in and out and ‘driving’ along the street. In our case, we can clearly see the Volkswagen building with its logo.

It isn’t always this easy, sometimes you have to look around a bit on Baidu Total View to actually find what you’re looking for.

I hope this short and simple blog post can help you when using Baidu Total View. Just play around with the tool a bit to learn more. If you have any questions or remarks, feel free to use the comment section underneath this blog post.

Ingmar Heinrich / 03.12.2018