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Baidu is the world's 6th largest Website, the majority of its users are based in China where it holds a market share of upwards of 70% for all search engine traffic. This makes Baidu very unique because there are only 5 countries where Google is not the largest Search Engine and China earns a spot on that list by having Baidu be its largest search engine. Furthermore, Baidu was the original pioneer behind many search engine innovations, innovations that Google has since copied, popularised, and profited billions on. For example: in 2001, Baidu allowed advertisers to bid for ad space and then pay Baidu every time a customer clicked on an ad, Google would later copy this concept, In fact in 1995 Robin Li the founder of Baidu patented a technology he called “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, Google founder Larry Page even referenced Li's work as a citation in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank.

This is the story of Baidu: How it became China’s largest Search Engine and ultimately played a critical role in Google's decision to abandon the Chinese Search Engine Market.

Robin Li was born in China, Both of his parents were factory workers. Li was the fourth of five children, and the only boy. After developing an interest in computers during high school he enrolled in the prestigious Peking University to study information management. He would later move to the US where he would go on to earn a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

After graduating he joined Dow Jones and Company where he helped to develop a software program for the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. During this period, he came up with the previously mentioned idea of “Link Analysis”. In 1997 he left Dow Jones to work for Infoseek a pioneer late 90s search engine company, during this period where he decided he wanted to start Baidu. His idea was simple, to create a Search Engine specifically tailored for the Chinese Market he pitched the idea to a friend called Eric Xu he loved the idea and the pair would found Baidu in the year 2000 in Beijing, China.

Baidu which is the anglicized Chinese word meaning “100 times” started with a team made up of seven people, 4 of which were still students because of the busy schedule of the students' meetings were usually held in the evenings sometimes starting at 10 pm. Baidu managed to raise $1.2 Million in initial investments and within four months of its founding, it had a viable search engine that far exceeded other Chinese search engines.

When Baidu released its search engine it directly put them in the crosshairs of Google. Baidu’s plan was to overtake Google in the number of indexed Chinese Web Pages. Indexes are essentially a database that the search algorithm would go through to pull results, the higher the number of indexes they had the more accurate their search results would be.

His investors at the time asked him how much he thought the company was worth and he said $2 Billion, Google was not willing to acquire Baidu at the price and thus ended its interest in trying to acquire Baidu. Baidu would later IPO, by the end of the first day of trading the company was valued at nearly $4 Billion. In 2010 Google closed its operations in China.

Today Baidu has over 70% of the search engine market share in China. As of May 2018, Baidu's market cap rose to US$99 billion. Baidu has more than 7,000 AI-related patents in China, the highest in the country.