Qi Lu calls his search work, taking on Google, “an unfinished mission.”
Qi Lu “is probably the best competition I can have,” a Google executive said.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Lu played a leading role in building Yahoo’s Internet search and advertising technologies. The effort was so important that Yahoo backed it with billions of dollars to acquire companies, hire armies of engineers and develop and run its own systems. Yet Yahoo fell further and further behind and many analysts said the company was simply outgunned by Google.
Mr. Lu, who is 47, left Yahoo 14 months ago, but now finds himself once again leading the charge against Google. This time, he is backed by a patron that vows to spend even more than Yahoo did on the mission: Microsoft.
“It’s an unfinished mission that I would like to work on,” he said.
The challenge for Mr. Lu and his team remains enormous, and success appears improbable. But since Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, tapped him to become president of the company’s online services division in December, Mr. Lu, a self-effacing engineer who is one of the most private and atypical executives in the upper ranks of the Internet industry, has earned the confidence of Microsoft’s troops and helped to bring a dose of optimism to a beaten-down team.
Possessing unusual stamina and a maniacal work ethic, he has pushed his team hard to give Microsoft an important victory. In nightly 9:30 meetings over several weeks, he leaned on his managers to find creative ways to structure a sweeping and complex partnership with Yahoo. The deal, signed in July, will give Microsoft something it has coveted for years: a vastly larger audience that will make Bing, its search engine, the runner-up to Google.
But Mr. Lu and his team will have a lot of running to do. Even after adding Yahoo’s search traffic, Bing’s share of the search market will be less than half as big as Google’s. Closing that immense gap will be difficult, in part because most users are happy with Google, which is constantly improving its search service.
In a lengthy interview last week at Microsoft’s headquarters, Mr. Lu said he was not underestimating the challenge. But over time, he said, Microsoft has a chance to offer a service that is different and compelling enough to compete effectively.
For Microsoft, succeeding in search is vital to the company’s long-term health. For Mr. Lu, it is a mission he felt obligated to take on.
“I do think that this is answering a call to duty,” he said. Wearing a Bing T-shirt tucked into jeans held up by a black leather belt and wearing brown sandals and white socks, the wiry Mr. Lu looked more like an engineer than a senior executive.
And with an engineer’s logic, he laid out his reasons for returning to the fray. Search determines where users go online, and search advertising is the most powerful economic force on the Internet. The business is too important to be controlled by a single company, he says.
Having grown up poor in China, Mr. Lu said, he feels duty-bound not to squander the rare opportunity he was given. He was raised by his grandparents in a rural village with no electricity or running water.
His intelligence got him into Fudan University in Shanghai. After finishing his master’s degree in computer science, he attended a talk given by Edmund M. Clarke, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Impressed by Mr. Lu’s questions and research, Professor Clarke invited him to apply to a doctorate program.
Mr. Lu, who earned about $10 a month teaching at the university, could not afford even the application fee, so the professor arranged for the fee to be waived and Mr. Lu was admitted.
Mr. Lu says the challenges he faced growing up turned out to be a blessing: “You can say it’s harsh, but it teaches you so many things.”
After earning his Ph.D. in 1996, he went to work at one of I.B.M.’s prestigious research labs.
He was lured to Yahoo in 1998. A few years later, as Google and Yahoo squared off, he headed the development of Yahoo’s search and search advertising technologies.
By all accounts, Mr. Lu poured his heart and soul into the mission. Hired as an engineer, he rose through the ranks not by personal ambition but rather through sheer intellectual ability and his willingness to take on ever larger roles. Eventually, he ran a team of about 3,000 engineers.
“He shunned the limelight, but he was considered one of the stars of Yahoo,” said Tim Cadogan, the chief executive of Open X, an advertising technology company, who worked closely with Mr. Lu at Yahoo.
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Courtesy of an article dated August 30, 2009 appearing in The New York Times
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