Chinese search engine giant Baidu has announced its business overhaul plan, following last month's revelations the company let unlicensed medical product suppliers buy higher rankings.
Baidu CEO Li Yanhong told Xinhua News the company intends to remove all unlicensed medical suppliers from its rankings.
The company will penalise employees who were involved in the scandal, he said, and has already fired employees found to have fabricated documents for unlicensed suppliers. He did not elaborate on this allegation.
Chinese news source CCTV reported in November that a number of patients had spent large sums of money on unlicensed suppliers, for little to no gain, based on the suppliers' prominence in Baidu search results.
Baidu fields around 70 percent of China's search engine traffic, receiving more than 100 million clicks a day.