What search engine did Robin Li create in 1996 before Baidu?

The search engine Robin Li created in 1996 before Baidu was RankDex.

Li developed RankDex while working at IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones. The project introduced a site-scoring and page-ranking approach that used links between websites to help estimate their importance. That idea made RankDex an important precursor to later link-analysis systems.

RankDex is often discussed alongside Google’s PageRank because Larry Page’s 1998 patent references Li’s earlier work. The systems were not identical, but both treated hyperlinks as useful signals for ranking search results rather than relying only on the words appearing on a page.

A subtle point is that sources sometimes describe RankDex as a search engine and sometimes emphasize its ranking algorithm or site-scoring technology. In quiz context, RankDex is the canonical answer because it was the search project Li developed in 1996. Li later used related RankDex technology when he co-founded Baidu with Eric Xu in 2000.