Baidu

Baidu, Inc. ( BY-doo; Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù; lit. 'hundred degrees') 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), Baidu Tieba (a forum platform similar to Reddit), and ES File Explorer.

Besides its core internet search business, Baidu has also diversified into other areas. Including autonomous driving (Baidu Apollo), smart consumer electronics (Xiaodu). and 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.

History

Early development

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.

2005: Public Listing on NASDAQ

Baidu went public on Wall Street through a variable interest entity (VIE) based in the Cayman Islands on 5 August 2005. In 2007, Chinese government and Chinese industry sources stated that Baidu received a license from Beijing, which allows the search engine to become a full-fledged news website. Thus Baidu is able to provide its own reports, besides showing certain results as a search engine. Baidu was the first Chinese search engine to receive such a license. Baidu started its Japanese language search service, run by Baidu Japan, the company's first regular service outside of China in 2008. The Japanese search engine closed on 16 March 2015.

On 31 July 2012, Baidu announced that it would team up with Sina to provide mobile search results. On 18 November 2012, Baidu announced that it would be partnering with Qualcomm to offer free cloud storage to Android users with Snapdragon processors. On 2 August 2013, Baidu launched its Personal Assistant app, designed to help CEOs, managers and the white-collar workers manage their business relationships. On 16 May 2014, Baidu appointed Andrew Ng as chief scientist. Ng will lead Baidu Research in Silicon Valley and Beijing. On 18 July 2014, the company launched a Brazilian version of the search engine, Baidu Busca. On 9 October 2014, Baidu announced acquisition of Brazilian local e-commerce site Peixe Urbano.

2017: Launch of Autonomous Driving Business…