On its first day of trading in August 2005, Baidu's stock rose from $27 to more than $122. That gain of about 354 percent was one of the largest first-day jumps since the dot-com bubble. Investors were buying a five-year-old Beijing company that answered the questions of China's fast-growing population of internet users, in Chinese. Google was still a small player in China, and Baidu already led the market.

A Name From a Poem

Robin Li and Eric Xu founded Baidu in Beijing in January 2000. Li had worked on search technology in the United States, including a patented method for ranking pages by the links that pointed to them. The name comes from a Song dynasty poem about searching for someone in a festival crowd a hundred, a thousand times. Baidu began by selling search to Chinese portals, then built its own site and made money from paid search results.

From $27 to $122

Baidu sold American depositary shares at $27 each on Nasdaq on August 5, 2005. They closed the day at $122.54. In the years after, Google pulled back from mainland China, and Baidu became the default search engine for hundreds of millions of people. It expanded into maps, cloud services and self-driving cars. Baidu added a second listing in Hong Kong in 2021 and still trades on Nasdaq under the ticker BIDU.

Cover: One Hundred Cranes 百鶴圖, Shen Quan. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for one hundred cranes (Baidu: 'a hundred times').