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."
Tropical Storm Usagi strengthened to a typhoon yesterday morning and remains on track to brush past southeastern Taiwan from tomorrow to Sunday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was approximately 950km east-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost point, the CWA said. It is expected to enter the Bashi Channel and then turn north, moving into waters southeast of Taiwan, it said. The agency said it could issue a sea warning in the early hours of today and a land warning in the afternoon. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was moving at
UPDATED FORECAST: The warning covered areas of Pingtung County and Hengchun Peninsula, while a sea warning covering the southern Taiwan Strait was amended The Central Weather Administration (CWA) at 5:30pm yesterday issued a land warning for Typhoon Usagi as the storm approached Taiwan from the south after passing over the Philippines. As of 5pm, Usagi was 420km south-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost tip, with an average radius of 150km, the CWA said. The land warning covered areas of Pingtung County and the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春), and came with an amended sea warning, updating a warning issued yesterday morning to cover the southern part of the Taiwan Strait. No local governments had announced any class or office closures as of press time last night. The typhoon
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
RSS