In the summer of 1998 at a picnic in Silicon Valley, Eric Xu, a 34-year-old biochemist, introduced his shy, reserved friend Robin Li to John Wu, then the head of Yahoo's search engine team.
Li, 30 at the time, was a frustrated staff engineer at Infoseek, an Internet search engine partly owned by Disney, a company with a fading commitment to Infoseek that did not mesh with Li's ongoing passion for search. Like Disney, Wu and Yahoo were also losing interest in the business prospects of search, and Yahoo eventually outsourced all of its search functions to a little startup named Google.
Xu thought the two search guys would hit it off.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Wu says he exchanged greetings with Robin Li, but what most impressed him was that despite all of the pessimism surrounding search, Li remained undaunted.
"The people at Yahoo didn't think search was all that important, and so neither did I," says Wu, who is now the chief technology officer at the Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com. "But Robin seemed very determined to stick with it. And you have to admire what he accomplished."
Indeed. A year after the picnic, in 1999, Li founded his own search company in China, naming it Baidu (pronounced "by-DOO").
Today, Baidu has a market value of US$3 billion and operates the fourth-most trafficked Web site in the world. And Baidu is doing what no other Internet company has been able to do: clobbering Google and Yahoo in its home market.
While Baidu continues to gain market share in China, and does so with a Web site that the Chinese government heavily censors and that gives priority to advertising rather than relevant search results.
Baidu's evolution, and Li's journey as an entrepreneur, offer textbook examples of the payoffs and perils of doing business in China and suggest that Baidu may prove to be far more resilient than some analysts believe.
China has a population of 1.3 billion, about 130 million of whom are Internet users, an online market second in size only to the US market. Because China is the world's fastest-growing major economy, analysts consider it the next great Internet battleground, with Baidu uniquely positioned to prosper from that competition.
In exchange for letting censors oversee its Web site, Baidu has sealed its dominance with support from the Chinese government, which regularly blocks Google here and imposes strict rules and censorship on other foreign Internet companies.
In addition, analysts say, entrepreneurs in China have a knack for pummeling US Internet giants.
"The globally dominant US Internet companies have failed to take the No.1 market share position in any category," says Jason Brueschke, a Citigroup analyst, of the Chinese market. "And they came with more money and major brand names. And so there's something fundamentally different about this market."
So fundamentally different, Brueschke believes, that Baidu will retain its lock on the Chinese search industry.
Li says Baidu's model is working supremely well and that the company has built a loyal base of users who value its search capabilities.
"At the end of the day, if a user finds relevant information, they'll come back," he says.
On its Web site, Baidu says that it takes its name from a Song Dynasty poem that "compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles."
Li, born Li Yanhong in 1968, is familiar with life's obstacles. The fourth of five children, he grew up during China's brutal Cultural Revolution. He was bright enough to get into the country's most prestigious school, Beijing University, where he dabbled in computer science.
The government's crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square came in 1989 when Li was a sophomore, causing his college campus to be shut down.
Interested in studying abroad, he enrolled at State University of New York-Buffalo. He completed his master's degree in 1994 and then joined a New Jersey division of Dow Jones & Company, where he helped develop a software program for the Wall Street Journal's online edition. During that time, he also spent much of his time trying to solve one of the Internet industry's earliest problems: sorting information.
A breakthrough came in 1996, he says, when he developed a search mechanism he called "link analysis," which involved ranking the popularity of a Web site based on how many other Web sites had linked to it.
"The moment I created this thing I was very excited," he says. "I told my boss and pushed him. But he wasn't very excited."
Soon after, he attended a computer conference in Silicon Valley and set up his own booth to demonstrate his search findings.
William Chang, then the chief technology officer at Infoseek, met Li at the conference and recruited him to oversee search development.
"Robin is possibly the single most brilliant and focused person I know," Chang says. "And his inventions, now widely adopted, are still the gold standards in Web search relevance."
The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet. “I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila. “We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for
MASSIVE LOSS: If the next recall votes also fail, it would signal that the administration of President William Lai would continue to face strong resistance within the legislature The results of recall votes yesterday dealt a blow to the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) efforts to overturn the opposition-controlled legislature, as all 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers survived the recall bids. Backed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) DPP, civic groups led the recall drive, seeking to remove 31 out of 39 KMT lawmakers from the 113-seat legislature, in which the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) together hold a majority with 62 seats, while the DPP holds 51 seats. The scale of the recall elections was unprecedented, with another seven KMT lawmakers facing similar votes on Aug. 23. For a
Taiwan must invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to keep abreast of the next technological leap toward automation, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said at the luanch ceremony of Taiwan AI and Robots Alliance yesterday. The world is on the cusp of a new industrial revolution centered on AI and robotics, which would likely lead to a thorough transformation of human society, she told an event marking the establishment of a national AI and robotics alliance in Taipei. The arrival of the next industrial revolution could be a matter of years, she said. The pace of automation in the global economy can
All 24 lawmakers of the main opposition Chinese Nationalists Party (KMT) on Saturday survived historical nationwide recall elections, ensuring that the KMT along with Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers will maintain opposition control of the legislature. Recall votes against all 24 KMT lawmakers as well as Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) and KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁) failed to pass, according to Central Election Commission (CEC) figures. In only six of the 24 recall votes did the ballots cast in favor of the recall even meet the threshold of 25 percent of eligible voters needed for the recall to pass,