Lost in the Library: How a Single Book Ignited Robin Li's Search Dream

Prologue: Lost at Sea in a World of Books

In the autumn of 1987, the air at Peking University was thick with the scent of osmanthus and the fragrance of knowledge. A 19-year-old Robin Li, fresh from Yangquan, Shanxi, had just enrolled in China's most prestigious institution, his eyes full of hope for the future.

He had been a bookworm since childhood, and the Peking University Library—the largest university library in Asia—was, in his eyes, a sacred temple of knowledge. During the first week of school, he eagerly rushed into the magnificent building.

However, the next few hours dealt him an unexpected blow.

He wanted to find a book on computer graphics. He first went to the card catalog hall, flipping through yellowed cards in towering wooden cabinets. After finding the index card, he copied down the call number, walked through long corridors to the corresponding stacks, and began hunting. Faced with shelves that reached the ceiling, he felt like a detective, searching for a single number among a dense forest of book spines.

One hour passed, then two. As time ticked by in the stuffy air, beads of sweat formed on his forehead. His initial excitement gradually gave way to anxiety and confusion.

"Why is it so hard to find one book?" he wondered, leaning against a bookshelf. "This is supposed to be an ocean of knowledge, so why do I feel like a sailor who's lost his bearings?"

The entire afternoon slipped away, and he never found the book. This "failed voyage" in the temple of knowledge gave him his first painful, personal experience of the vast gulf between "information" and "access."

Act I: From Library Science to Computer Science

The failed search was like a stone tossed into the calm lake of Robin Li's mind, sending ripples across its surface.

He had been assigned to the "Library and Information Science" major, a field he knew nothing about. At the time, it was a deeply unpopular subject that many students felt had no financial prospects, and they scrambled to transfer to other departments. Robin, too, had felt lost.

But his experience in the library gave him a new perspective. He realized the core problem of a library was how to manage a massive amount of information and allow people to access it efficiently. Wasn't that the very source of his recent frustration?

An idea struck him like a bolt of lightning: perhaps the ultimate solution wasn't more catalog cards or bigger shelves, but something else he was fascinated by—computers.

He began to frantically teach himself computer science, spending all his time in the computer lab. While his classmates worried about their future careers, he had already seen the immense potential of combining information management with computer science. He became convinced that in the future, the most valuable thing would not be information itself, but the ability to access it efficiently.

"What I want to do," he thought, "is use technology to draw an accurate nautical chart for this ocean of information." This idea became the core motivation for his studies during his four years at Peking University.

Act II: Flight to a New World

In 1991, Robin Li graduated from Peking University with honors. China was in the midst of its first wave of "plunging into the sea" of business. Yet, Robin made a decision that surprised many: he gave up a stable job in China to pursue a master's degree in computer science in the United States.

The decision was driven by a deeper hunger for knowledge about information retrieval technology. He knew that the world's most advanced search engine technology was in the U.S. To create his "nautical chart," he had to go to the world's most advanced "shipyard" to learn.

His time at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, opened up a whole new world. Here, for the first time, he systematically studied the theoretical core of information retrieval and felt the full force of the internet wave.

He absorbed knowledge like a sponge. He later recalled sleeping only three or four hours a night, spending all his waking hours either coding or reading academic papers.

It was this period of intense accumulation that transformed him from a Peking University student with a nascent understanding of information management into a professional engineer who had mastered the core technology of search engines.

Epilogue: The Seed by the Unnamed Lake

Years later, when the company he founded, Baidu, had become China's largest search engine and held the scepter of the information age, Robin Li would still often think back to that afternoon in 1987, lost in the Peking University Library.

He told the media and his employees more than once that it was that seemingly accidental, frustrating search for a book that first made him realize the true value of "search."

The seed planted by the shore of Peking University's Unnamed Lake, nurtured by the sun and rain of America, eventually grew into a towering tree in the vast land of China.

This story teaches us that the grand narratives of world-changing events often begin with a trivial personal experience—a moment that makes you feel "inconvenient," "uncomfortable," or that something is just "not right."

And a great entrepreneur is someone who can transform that feeling of discomfort into the immense energy needed to change the world.