When Baidu launched its initial public offering on the Nasdaq in 2005 it was widely hailed as China’s answer to Google, and it would later follow the California-based giant into the field of artificial intelligence, but today the Chinese company’s market valuation is only 6.3 per cent the size of Google’s.
Since its own listing in 2004, Google has parlayed its 90 per cent dominance of the global internet search market into an online advertisement juggernaut that pulled in US$146.9 billion last year, taking an estimated 45 per cent of every new digital advertising dollar spent.