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...then came Jan. 12, and for Li and Baidu, things went from the sublime to the ridiculous. That's the day Google drew its now famous line in the sand, saying it was no longer willing to censor its Internet searches in China - as the authoritarian government demands - given what it believes have been repeated attempts by Chinese authorities to hack its systems and steal dissidents' Gmail addresses. However noble Google's sentiment may be, in business terms it was "effectively a suicide note" when it came to the search business, as one rival Internet executive put it. "Google...
...that Baidu's shareholders are likely to complain. The company already collects 64% of the revenue generated by search engines in China via advertising, according to Analysys International, a market-research firm, and claims 76% of overall search traffic. The comparable figures for Google are 31% and 20%. If Google soon shuts down its Chinese search engine (Google.cn) - as most analysts believe it will - Baidu will grab even more. Dick Wei, senior analyst at JPMorgan Securities in Hong Kong, estimates that if Google loses a quarter of its China traffic, Baidu will reap a 6% gain in revenue; the gain...
...After getting his master's degree in computer science, Li became a consultant for IDD in 1994, then a financial-database company that was a subsidiary of Dow Jones. Even then, Li says, he was "intrigued with search," long before it became the hugely powerful, money-spinning machine that it is today. At IDD he developed an algorithm that ranked the popularity of various websites. He then got recruited by Infoseek, a company that had developed one of the first search engines in the mid-'90s - only to see Walt Disney acquire the company and shift its focus...
...earliest investors, in fact, was Google - before the company entered the China market in 2006. It paid $5 million for a 2.6% stake in Baidu in 2004. But Google sold its stake in Baidu for about $60 million two years later, and entered the search business in China on its own. It was game...
...Baidu got traction in its home market by focusing its search engine on China-centric information. "Initially, we were better [than Google] on stuff a Chinese Internet user would search for," says one insider. "They've since closed that gap somewhat, but that emphasis early helped us get and maintain our lead.'' Baidu has also introduced a question-and-answer service called "Baidu Knows," which is a hit. And the company just won a big legal battle when a popular music-download function it offers was cleared of copyright infringement by a Beijing court. The complaint had been brought against...