… population was coming online …  with apps — stepping around the nation’s dominant search engine… Baidu CEO Robin Li came up with a fix. He shifted the company’s focus from online to offline services (or O2O), positioning Baidu to be the connective tissue between China’s Internet and its sprawling real-world commerce. Baidu indexed some apps for search, and cut deal with others for retail services as disparate as movie theater seats and massage parlors. Read more: http://recode.net/2015/07/25/chinas-baidu-with-uber-in-tow-takes-search-to-the-offline-world-qa/