Which Chinese search engine startup was founded by Robin Li? Baidu. Robin Li co-founded Baidu with Eric Xu in Beijing on January 18, 2000. The company grew from Li’s earlier work on search technology, especially RankDex, a 1996 system that used links between websites to help rank search results.
Baidu became the leading Chinese-language search service and later expanded well beyond web search. Its products have included Baidu Baike, Baidu Tieba, Baidu Maps, cloud services, mobile applications, and artificial-intelligence systems. The company’s name, 百度, is commonly translated as “hundreds of times” and comes from a line in a classical Chinese poem describing a repeated search for something elusive.
The main distinction in this question is between Baidu and Robin Li’s earlier RankDex project. RankDex was an important predecessor and source of ideas, but it was not the company founded in 2000. Another common mistake is assuming Baidu is simply China’s version of Google; although search is its foundation, Baidu has developed a broad internet and AI business.