Baidu

Baidu, Inc. (/ˈbaɪduː/ BY-doo; Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù; lit. 'hundred times') is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet services and artificial intelligence. It holds a dominant position in China's search engine market (via Baidu Search), and provides a wide variety of other internet services such as Baidu App (Baidu's flagship app for search and newsfeed), Baidu Baike (an online user created Wikipedia-like encyclopedia), iQIYI (a video streaming service), and Baidu Tieba (a keyword-based discussion forum similar to Reddit).

Besides its core internet search business, Baidu has diversified into several high-growth areas. The company is a player in autonomous driving (Baidu Apollo), and smart consumer electronics (Xiaodu). With over a decade of investment in artificial intelligence, Baidu is one of the few tech companies globally to offer a full-service AI stack, including software, chips, cloud infrastructure, foundation models, and applications.

A variable interest entity for Baidu to enable investment of foreign capital is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Baidu was incorporated in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Baidu has origins in RankDex, an earlier search engine developed by Robin Li in 1996, before he founded Baidu in 2000. The company is headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District.

In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index. As of May 2018, Baidu's market cap rose to US$99 billion. In October 2018, Baidu became the first Chinese firm to join the United States–based computer ethics consortium Partnership on AI.

The Chinese government views Baidu as one of its national champion corporations.

In 1994, Robin Li (Pinyin: Li Yanhong, Chinese: 李彦宏) joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop software for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. He also worked on developing better algorithms for search engines and remained at IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.

In 1996, while at IDD, Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. Launched in 1996, RankDex was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing. Li referred to his search mechanism as "link analysis," which involved ranking the popularity of a web site based on how many other sites had linked to it. It predated the similar PageRank algorithm used by Google two years later in 1998; Google founder Larry Page referenced Li's work as a citation in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank. Li later used his RankDex technology for the Baidu search engine.

Baidu was incorporated on 18 January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. In 2001, Baidu allowed advertisers to bid for ad space then pay Baidu every time a customer clicked on an ad, predating Google's approach to advertising. In 2003, Baidu launched a news search engine and picture search engine, adopting a special identification technology capable of identifying and grouping the articles.