Baidu

While working in the US, Robin Li developed RankDex, a search algorithm that weighted pages by the links pointing at them; the patent application was filed in 1997. He co-founded Baidu in Beijing in 2000 with Eric Xu. The name comes from a Song dynasty poem. When Google pulled out of mainland China in 2010, Baidu had the market more or less to itself.

Since the 2010s it has bet heavily on AI: the Ernie family of language models, the Ernie Bot chatbot launched in 2023 as China's answer to ChatGPT, and Apollo, a self-driving platform running driverless taxis in Wuhan and elsewhere. Competition from Tencent, Alibaba and DeepSeek has narrowed the lead.