Dig into the history of Baidu, however, and you’ll find it has Valley roots of its own. CEO Robin Li cofounded the company in 2000 with biotech salesman Eric Xu, after a stint as an engineer at the Sunnyvale-­based search engine Infoseek. Li was armed with a patent for a way to rank sites in search listings by the number of incoming links—filed in 1997, a year before Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page patented their similar PageRank algorithm. As China’s Internet population grew, so did Baidu, enough to attract a $5 million investment in 2004 from Google itself—which later tried to buy Baidu for $1.6 billion in an attempt to head off the Chinese company’s IPO, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Instead, Baidu went public in August 2005, and shares rocketed 354 percent the first day. Much as Google had done in the United States, Baidu quickly solidified its hold on China’s search market and used the profits to expand into a range of other online services.