Robin Li

Robin Li (simplified Chinese: 李彦宏; traditional Chinese: 李彥宏; pinyin: Lǐ Yànhóng; born November 17, 1968) is a Chinese entrepreneur, co-founder of China's most popular search engine Baidu.

Li studied information management at Peking University and the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 2000 he founded Baidu with Eric Xu (徐勇). He has been the CEO of Baidu since January 2004, which was listed on NASDAQ in August 2005.^[1]

Early years

Li was born in Yangquan, Shanxi, China, where he spent most of his childhood. Both of his parents were factory workers. Li was the fourth of five children, and the only boy among the five.^[2]

Li was admitted by Yangquan First High School by achieving the second highest grades in the entrance examination. In high school, Li enjoyed computer class and participated in numerous programming competitions city-wide. In 1987, Li attended the National Higher Education Entrance Examination and achieved the top grade among all examinees in Yangquan. Consequently, he chose Peking Universityfor college where he studied information management for four years and received a Bachelor of Science degree.

In the fall of 1991, Li went to SUNY-Buffalo in the US to study computer science towards a Doctoral degree. He received his Master of Science degree in 1994 after he had decided to discontinue his PhD program work.^[3]

[edit]Road to Baidu

In 1994, Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.^[4] He also did work on better algorithms for search engines. He 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 ^[5][6][7] and received a US patent for the technology.^[8] He later used this technology for the Baidu search engine.

Robin worked as a staff engineer for Infoseek, a pioneer internet search engine company, from July 1997 to December 1999.

Another of his important innovative achievements was the picture search of Go.com.^[9]

In the nine years since founding Baidu in January 2000, Robin has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 70% market share, and the third largest independent search engine in the world. In 2005, Baidu completed its successful IPO on NASDAQ, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.

He was listed in the CNN Money annual "50 people who matter now" in 2007. ^[10]

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