What's Baidu doing with all these crazy characters everywhere? What's Baidu doing with all these crazy characters everywhere?


Seems kind of meaningless to me.
That's a web development technique, the icon font

What you see is meaningless text. This is actually a web development technique. They are attempting the use a custom designed "font" to display icons instead of the weird characters. However, when the icon font failed to load, your browser then attempts to display the "text" with a fallback font, generally: "Arial", "Times New Roman", "PMingLiU", etc.

So instead of 梜, you should see an chevron to the right. That's because they filled the font with icons.

Here's an example of such font: Font Awesome



Can I use icon fonts to write a passage?

Icon fonts are only meant for graphical displays, not readable font. You cannot type a paragraph with the icon font, they would probably all be icons (for you to decipher ;) ).

Why did they use icon font, why not pictures?

That is because modern font is vector graphical. That means you can scale they up or down and they will not get pixelized. That is great for devices with high quality displays. Also, because loading a font means you can change its color and the pack will still be smaller than an image pack.