Baidu is the search engine whose name literally means “a hundred times” in Chinese. The name is written 百度 and is pronounced Bǎidù in Mandarin.
The name comes from a line in “Green Jade Table in the Lantern Festival,” a classical poem by the Song-dynasty writer Xin Qiji. The poem describes searching through a crowd repeatedly before suddenly finding the desired person in a dimly lit place. Baidu’s name therefore evokes persistent searching and discovery; it is also sometimes rendered as “countless times.”
Baidu was incorporated in Beijing in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. It grew into a major Chinese internet company whose services include search, maps, an online encyclopedia, forums, cloud storage, and artificial-intelligence products. The literal translation does not mean “search engine”; it is a poetic reference to repeated searching.