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For the Ilkhanate ruler, see Baydu. Baidu () () is a Chinese search engine which can search text and images. As of May 2006, it is fourth in Alexa's internet rankings.• The Chinese word "Baidu" translates to "hundreds of times" in English. Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files.•
Name The name of Baidu was inspired by a Song Dynasty poem constructed in the ci form, written by Xin Qiji in the 12th century. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. Hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood. (众里寻他千百度。蓦然回首，那人却在，灯火阑珊处。) Baidu, literally meaning hundreds of degrees, represents persistent search for the ideal. Services Baidu's most popular feature is its support for multimedia search, called "MP3 Search". It can locate file formats such as MP3, WMA and SWF. The multimedia search feature is mainly used in searches for Chinese pop music. While such works are copyrighted under Chinese law, intellectual property laws are not actively enforced in China. See: Intellectual property in the People's Republic of China Yahoo! China recently offered a similar service. Baidu uses the same "pay-per-click" model for ad revenues as Google. Other than images and text search, Baidu provides several other services: Public offering Baidu.com had its initial public offering (IPO) the morning of Friday, 5 August 2005. • Baidu.com opened at $27/share. At the close of Nasdaq trading on that Friday, Baidu.com shares closed at $122.54, up $95.54 from its opening price (a gain of 353%). However, over the next few trading days, Baidu stock pulled back rapidly, closing at $91.75 on August 10. Baidu.com has been called the "Google of China". Google was a shareholder in Baidu.com and owned 2.6% of the company until June 2006.• On September 14 2005, the stock plunged 24% on the Nasdaq after two analysts said it was "overpriced."• | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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