10 years of Knowledge hero for China internet

If 10 years is an Internet enterprise's adulthood, then in the last two years, the first generation of Chinese Internet companies have entered adulthood. Sina, Sohu, NetEase, Tencent, Alibaba, grand and so on, all from the outset not be bullish, become today important big company. As the first generation of internet companies to create a relatively late one, Baidu is also about to usher in its 10-year-old birthday.

1998-2000, is the first climax of China's internet, as I said in the last article, a group of powerless knowledge heroes, began the new economic experiment. Now think of it, when the Internet, or a wilderness, the knowledge of heroes do, in fact, is mainly enclosure. Sina, Sohu, NetEase, the circle is the portal, Tencent Circle is im, Alibaba Circle E-commerce, Grand Circle game. The core competencies of these enterprises are not laid at the outset, but their foresight, so that they have achieved a favorable starting position, it is easy to get funds, talent and other external resources injected, so as to build the threshold of entry. Coupled with their persistence for 10 years, it becomes more difficult for the latter to go beyond.

By comparison, Baidu may be the only company in the first generation of internet companies to have a technology career. In other words, from the company's first day of establishment, technological innovation has become Baidu's core competencies and corporate genes. Such a situation is not common on the Chinese Internet.

I have found a solution to a problem on Google answers, which has been closed, which is related to Robin Li before returning to business and reads like a detective story.

October 2005, a user spent 200 of dollars to Google answers asked: In 1996-1997 years, who has linkrank.com this site. The user had this question because, in the PageRank Patent application form (PDF file) submitted by Larry Page to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the site was mentioned in the "possible proximity or related patents" section. Page is so stated: "There is a company I recently learned, the address is http://www.linkrank.com/." They seem to have similar results, but they do not explain any details of the methods used. They claim to have a pending patent. ”

After a number of Google answers experts repeatedly verified that the truth gradually surfaced. The site that caught the founder's attention was not linkrank.com, but ranklink.com (not knowing whether page was intentionally or unintentionally mistaken), and the developer was Robin Li, a graduate student at Buffalo University. This is the first work that Li put into practice the idea of hyper-chain analysis. 1997, Li joined InfoSeek. InfoSeek, as a listed company, is keen on commercial operation, but is increasingly ignoring the search technology itself. As a search engineer, Li is deeply helpless. In 1998, Li's trial work, together with technology patents, was bought by Dow Jones and then shelved. At the end of 1999, Li, with cavity enthusiasm and a small amount of venture capital, returned to founder Baidu.

I've never seen Baidu as a rodeo, like most first-generation Internet companies. Li believed in technology, not the land that was first circled. A few days ago, I was standing in front of the building of Baidu search box, looking at the building that may be the best in the whole area, as if to see some kind of wonderful link between the unreal technology and the real wealth. In the path to wealth, Li's choice of route may be the most indirect one, but it may be the most solid and reliable one, and it is closest to the nature of the Internet.

Over the past 10 years, internet companies that have grown into giants have become more and more alike. They enter each other's territory, do their opponents have done business, even if it is entirely relying on sales culture to start a company, such as Alibaba, also pay more and more attention to technology, attention to technical personnel absorption and training, pay attention to technology and research and development input. In the process, Baidu bright technical color, but it is a pity to dilute.

Until the Baidu IPO, in the ideal international building that appears very empty office, Li advocated by the free, random, equal, trust engineer culture, still everywhere. Although there is no chef and delicious food, there is no creative design of the workplace, but there is still China's top internet technology talent dream place. But that atmosphere now seems to be moving away from richer Baidu.

The technical style of Baidu, which has always been pragmatic, avoids the risk of being too advanced, and the paranoia of innovation for innovation, but it is also likely to lead to a lack of subsequent weakness, as well as myopia around the "liquidity". From a more macroscopic pattern, Robin Li and Google in the 2012 and the ideal of governance, after all, still rely on real technical ability to achieve.

With 7,000 employees, annual income of 4 billion yuan, in China to occupy more than 70% of the search market share, all this can only represent the past. What I would like to see is that in the next 10 years, Chinese Internet entrepreneurs will have a higher ideal and a bigger pattern, not only to change China, but also to become an indispensable force in the world. As Obama said: "Many other countries will be waiting for us, they want to see what we do." ”

Happy birthday! Baidu, as well as all the Chinese Internet struggle for 10 years of knowledge heroes.