The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google)_英文原版

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.

mr. li, 30 at the time, was a frustrated staff engineer at infoseek, an internet search engine partly owned by disney, a company whose fading commitment to infoseek did not mesh with mr. li’s ongoing passion for search. like disney, mr. wu and yahoo were also losing interest in the business prospects of search, and yahoo — in a colossal corporate blunder — eventually outsourced all of its search functions to a little startup named google.

mr. xu, who had called together some friends for a documentary he was making on silicon valley, thought the two search guys would hit it off. mr. wu says he exchanged greetings with robin li, but what most impressed him was that despite all of the pessimism surrounding search, mr. li remained undaunted.

“the people at yahoo didn’t think search was all that important, and so neither did i,” says mr. wu, who is now the chief technology officer at the chinese internet company alibaba.com. “but robin, he seemed very determined to stick with it. and you have to admire what he accomplished.”

indeed. a year after the picnic, in 1999, mr. li founded his own search company in china, naming it baidu (pronounced “by-doo”). today, baidu has a market value of $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 — some analysts question whether baidu can withstand competition from google and yahoo, which possess superior technology and global work forces.

but baidu’s evolution, and mr. 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 american 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 american internet giants. “the globally dominant u.s. internet companies have failed to take the no. 1 market share position in any category,” says jason d. 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, mr. brueschke believes, that baidu will retain its hammerlock on the chinese search industry. “the real battle in the competitive landscape is not about who’s no. 1, it’s about who’s going to be no. 2,” he says.

google, of course, will have none of this, stressing the independence of its search results and the international reach it offers users. “people want information and they want global information,” says kaifu lee, the president of google in china. “we can’t be bought.”

but mr. 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 corporate web site, baidu says that it takes its name from a song dynasty poem written several centuries ago 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.”

mr. li, born li yanhong in 1968 in what was then an impoverished city 200 miles southwest of beijing, is familiar with life’s obstacles. the fourth of five children, he grew up during china’s brutal cultural revolution. despite the oppression that surrounded him, he said he was always able to focus on stamp collecting, performing traditional opera and other interests — including, eventually, computers. he was bright enough to get into the country’s most prestigious school, beijing university, where he majored in library science and dabbled in computer science.

the government infamously cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrations in tiananmen square in 1989 when mr. li was a sophomore, causing his college campus to be shut down. mr. li is mum on the events that followed, saying only that he was apolitical. but he does say that a year later he started thinking of studying abroad and that by the time he graduated in 1991 he was ready to leave his homeland.

“china was a depressing place,” he says. “i thought there was no hope.”