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."
In his National Day Rally speech on Sunday, Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) quoted the Taiwanese song One Small Umbrella (一支小雨傘) to describe his nation’s situation. Wong’s use of such a song shows Singapore’s familiarity with Taiwan’s culture and is a perfect reflection of exchanges between the two nations, Representative to Singapore Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) said yesterday in a post on Facebook. Wong quoted the song, saying: “As the rain gets heavier, I will take care of you, and you,” in Mandarin, using it as a metaphor for Singaporeans coming together to face challenges. Other Singaporean politicians have also used Taiwanese songs
NORTHERN STRIKE: Taiwanese military personnel have been training ‘in strategic and tactical battle operations’ in Michigan, a former US diplomat said More than 500 Taiwanese troops participated in this year’s Northern Strike military exercise held at Lake Michigan by the US, a Pentagon-run news outlet reported yesterday. The Michigan National Guard-sponsored drill involved 7,500 military personnel from 36 nations and territories around the world, the Stars and Stripes said. This year’s edition of Northern Strike, which concluded on Sunday, simulated a war in the Indo-Pacific region in a departure from its traditional European focus, it said. The change indicated a greater shift in the US armed forces’ attention to a potential conflict in Asia, it added. Citing a briefing by a Michigan National Guard senior
CHIPMAKING INVESTMENT: J.W. Kuo told legislators that Department of Investment Review approval would be needed were Washington to seek a TSMC board seat Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said he received information about a possible US government investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and an assessment of the possible effect on the firm requires further discussion. If the US were to invest in TSMC, the plan would need to be reviewed by the Department of Investment Review, Kuo told reporters ahead of a hearing of the legislature’s Economics Committee. Kuo’s remarks came after US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said that the US government is looking into the federal government taking equity stakes in computer chip manufacturers that
CLAMPING DOWN: At the preliminary stage on Jan. 1 next year, only core personnel of the military, the civil service and public schools would be subject to inspections Regular checks are to be conducted from next year to clamp down on military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers with Chinese citizenship or Chinese household registration, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday. Article 9-1 of the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) stipulates that Taiwanese who obtain Chinese household registration or a Chinese passport would be deprived of their Taiwanese citizenship and lose their right to work in the military, public service or public schools, it said. To identify and prevent the illegal employment of holders of Chinese ID cards or
RSS