Baidu operates the search engine named Baidu, whose name means “hundreds of times” in Chinese.
Baidu was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. The company became one of China’s leading internet firms through web search, advertising, artificial-intelligence research, cloud services, and other technology products. Its core search service indexes Chinese-language and international web content for users.
The name “Baidu” comes from a line in the Song dynasty poem “The Lantern Festival,” which describes searching hundreds of times for something amid crowds. The phrase is commonly translated as “hundreds of times,” although translations of the poem vary in wording.
Baidu has expanded beyond search into autonomous driving, voice assistants, mapping, and generative artificial intelligence. Its Apollo project focuses on self-driving technology, while ERNIE is a family of large language models. Baidu is sometimes confused with Alibaba because both are major Chinese technology companies, but Alibaba is principally associated with commerce and cloud businesses.