Baidu
Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet services and artificial intelligence. It holds a dominant position in China's search engine market, and provides a wide variety of other internet services such as Baidu App, Baidu Baike, iQIYI, and Baidu Tieba.
Besides its core internet search business, Baidu has also diversified into other areas. Including autonomous driving, smart consumer electronics. 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 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 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 Dr. Andrew Ng as chief scientist. Dr. 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
In April 2017, Baidu announced the launch of its Apollo project, a self-driving vehicle platform, in a bid to help drive the development of autonomous cars including vehicle platform, hardware platform, open-source software platform and cloud data services. Baidu plans to launch this project in July 2017, before gradually introducing fully autonomous driving capabilities on highways and open city roads by 2020. In September 2017, Baidu launched a $1.5billion autonomous driving fund to invest in as many as 100 autonomous driving projects over the ensuing three years. At the same time, Apollo open-source software version 1.5 was also launched.In June 2017, Baidu partnered with Continental and Bosch, auto industry suppliers, on automated driving and connected cars.
In July 2017, Baidu GBU entered into a partnership with Snap Inc. to act as the company's official ad reseller for Snapchat in Greater China, South Korea, Japan and Singapore. The partnership was extended in 2019.
In September 2017, Baidu rolled out a new portable talking translator that can listen and speak in several different languages. Smaller than a typical smartphone, the 140-gram translation device can also be used as a portable Wi-Fi router and is able to operate on networks in 80 countries. It is still under development. Baidu will also be inserting artificial intelligence technology into smartphones, through its deep learning platform. At the same period, it has also led a joint investment of US$12billion with Alibaba Group, Tencent, JD.com and Didi Chuxing, acquiring 35% of China Unicom's stakes.
In October 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal, Baidu would launch self-driving buses in China in 2018. In the same month, Baidu announced that its first annual Baidu World technology conference would be held and live-streamed on 16 November 2017, at China World Summit Wing and Kerry Hotel, bringing together Baidu executives, employees, partners, developers, and media to discuss the company's mission and strategy, technology breakthroughs, new product developments, and its open artificial-intelligence ecosystem.
China's government designated Baidu as one of its "AI champions" in 2018.
In 2018, Baidu divested the "Global DU business" portion of its overseas business, which developed a series of utility apps including ES File Explorer, DU Caller, Mobojoy, Photo Wonder and DU Recorder, etc. This business now operates independently of Baidu under the name DO Global.
2021: Hong Kong Secondary Listing
In March 2021, Baidu secured a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising $3.1 billion. This marked the largest homecoming for a U.S.-traded Chinese company in Hong Kong since JD.com's listing the previous June.In August 2021 Baidu revealed a new Robocar concept said to be capable of Level 5 autonomous driving. It also comes with the latest second-generation AI chip that can analyse the internal and external surroundings to provide predictive suggestions to proactively serve the needs of passengers.
In June 2022, Jidu Auto, an intelligent electric vehicle company originally backed by Baidu and Geely unveiled its first concept ROBO-01 in the form of a pre-production vehicle. The ROBO-01 rides on the Sustainable Experience Architecture platform, a modular electric vehicle platform developed by Geely Holding.
In August 2023, Baidu publicly unveiled Ernie Bot, its large language model chatbot. In October 2023, Baidu released a newer version Ernie 4.0 chatbot. In September 2023, the search engine launched a chatbot based on its generative AI model, GenAI Ernie.
In January 2026, Baidu filed a listing application on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for their semiconductor unit, Kunlunxin.
Robotaxi
As of April 2024, Apollo Go, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service, had completed six million rides using driverless robotaxis across 11 cities. The service operates a fleet of over 400 driverless vehicles in Wuhan.In July 2025, Baidu announced its partnership with Uber, allowing it to deploy the Apollo Go outside the U.S and mainland China.
Domain name redirection attack
On 12 January 2010, Baidu.com's DNS records in the United States were altered such that browsers to baidu.com were redirected to a website purporting to be the Iranian Cyber Army, thought to be behind the attack on Twitter during the 2009 Iranian election protests, making the proper site unusable for four hours. Internet users were met with a page saying "This site has been attacked by Iranian Cyber Army". Chinese hackers responded by attacking Iranian websites and leaving messages.Baidu later launched legal action against Register.com for gross negligence after it was revealed that Register.com's technical support staff changed the email address for Baidu.com on the request of an unnamed individual, despite failing security verification procedures. Once the address had been changed, the individual was able to use the forgotten password feature to have Baidu's domain passwords sent directly to them, allowing them to accomplish the domain hijacking. The lawsuit was settled out of court under undisclosed terms after Register.com issued an apology.