Baidu has been doing search longer than most AI companies have existed. While OpenAI was still a research lab and Anthropic hadn't been founded yet, Baidu was already the dominant search engine for 1.4 billion people. Search is not something they learned recently. So when ERNIE 5.1 lands 4th on the Search Arena global leaderboard above Gemini 3.1 Pro with Grounding, above GPT-5.4 search variant and even above Google's own search-augmented model, it's surprising only if you forgot who built it.