In 1994, Robin Li (李彦宏) joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop software for the online edition of the Wall Street Journal.[15] He also worked on developing better algorithms for search engines and remained at IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.
In 1996, while at IDD, Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking[16][17][18] and received a US patent for the technology.[19] He later used this technology for the Baidu search engine.
In 2000, the company Baidu launched in Beijing, China. The first office was located in a hotel room, which was near Peking University from where Robin graduated.
In 2003, Baidu u news search engine and picture search engine, adopting a special identification technology capable of identifying and grouping the articles.