Introduction

baidu is a single Go binary built on the any-cli/kit framework. It reads Baidu through its public surfaces and prints clean structured records you can pipe into your tools. No API key is required.

Read operations, three ways

The read operations are defined once and exposed three ways:

• on the CLI, as baidu hot, baidu suggest, baidu search, baidu article, and baidu categories;
• over HTTP, with baidu serve (NDJSON responses; endpoints include /healthz and /v1/openapi.json);
• over MCP, with baidu mcp (an MCP server over stdio).

The same code answers all three, so a record you get on the CLI is the same record you get over HTTP or MCP.

Surfaces

• hot reads the hot search board, in rank order, across the realtime, novel, movie, teleplay, and car tabs.
• suggest calls the typeahead suggest API at www.baidu.com/sugrec, which returns clean UTF-8 JSON.
• search reads web search results.
• article and categories read the Baike (百度百科) encyclopedia: full article detail (abstract, body, infobox, sections, related-id link graph) and lemma stubs under category tags.

The mirror

The mirror subsystem is a CLI-only escape hatch for collecting Baike at scale. It is a stateful, resumable crawl into a local pure-Go SQLite store: seed queues topics or lemma ids, crawl works the queue with a worker pool, and export writes the mirrored records as JSONL or Markdown. info, queue, jobs, and reset-failed inspect and manage the run. The mirror is not exposed over HTTP or MCP.

Output

Every read command returns records. At a terminal the default format is a table; piped, it is JSONL. Pass -o json, -o csv, -o tsv, -o url, or -o markdown to change format explicitly, and --fields or --template to shape what each record shows.

Open, walled, geo-walled

Baidu does not serve every surface the same way to every IP, and the tool is honest about it:

• hot and suggest are open from any IP, no key.
• search is walled behind a CAPTCHA. From a datacenter or flagged IP it bounces; the command detects the block and exits cleanly (exit code 5, rate limited) with a hint to pass a real --baiduid cookie, rather than emitting a CAPTCHA page as data. A real BAIDUID improves the odds but is not guaranteed. Best effort.
• article and categories (Baike) are geo-walled. They answer fully from China IPs and return blocks from elsewhere. The tool recognises each block signal and degrades to a clean exit: a block reads as exit 5, a genuinely empty result as exit 3. It never crashes or fakes data. The Baike wall is at the IP/region layer, not an auth wall, so no cookie or token the client could send will open it (a China IP does).

Not affiliated

baidu-cli is an independent tool and is not affiliated with Baidu, Inc.