Baidu's founder ranked web pages by their links two years before Google did
In 1996, working for a Dow Jones division in New Jersey, Robin Li built RankDex, the first search engine to judge a site's quality by how many other sites linked to it. Google's PageRank followed in 1998, and Larry Page cited Li's work in some of his patents. Li later built Baidu on the same idea.
Li had joined IDD Information Services in 1994, writing software for the online Wall Street Journal while tinkering with better search algorithms, and he patented his link analysis method in the United States. In January 2000 he and Eric Xu incorporated Baidu in Beijing. The company moved quickly on advertising too: from 2001 it let advertisers bid for placement and pay for each click, ahead of Google's approach.
The name comes from poetry. Baidu means a hundred times, taken from the closing line of a classical poem by Xin Qiji about searching a festival crowd again and again for someone, then turning to find her standing where the lantern light is dimmest. It is an apt image for a search engine, and one that came to dominate China's market.
Milestones followed fast. Baidu listed in the United States in August 2005 through a holding structure registered in the Cayman Islands, and in December 2007 became the first Chinese company in the NASDAQ-100. Its Japanese search service, launched in 2008, closed in 2015. In 2010 attackers hijacked its domain for four hours after a registrar's support staff changed Baidu's account email on an unverified request, and Baidu sued the registrar, settling after an apology. Its heavy reliance on paid placement has also drawn criticism at home, with ads sometimes filling the first two pages of results.
Later bets moved beyond search. Andrew Ng became chief scientist in 2014, the Apollo self-driving platform launched in 2017 backed by a $1.5 billion fund, and by April 2024 the Apollo Go robotaxi service had given six million driverless rides across 11 cities. The Ernie chatbot appeared in 2023, and in 2025 Baidu claimed its Ernie X1 reasoning model matched a rival from DeepSeek at half the price.
Source: Baidu
