Qi Lu



Lu Qi, more commonly known as Qi Lu in English (pronounced "chee loo"), is a former executive at Microsoft working on the Bing search engine. Lu formerly worked as technology developer and manager for Yahoo!'s technology search division.

Lu faced and overcame difficulty and challenge from a young age. Facing persecution during China's Cultural Revolution, his parents sent him from their Shanghai home to live with his grandfather in a tiny town in Jiangsu province, five hours away. Lu did not have access to electricity or plumbing, and was so poor that meat was a once-a-year luxury. His first two choices to escape poverty were closed off: His slight build left him short of government weight mandates for coveted shipbuilding jobs, and his eyesight was too poor to pass requirements for becoming a physicist.

Lu studied at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He was assigned to a $10 a month teaching job in Shanghai after earning his master's degree. After a weekend rainstorm prevented his weekly bike ride home to see his parents, he was in his dorm room when a student pleaded with him to attend a poorly attended talk by Carnegie Mellon professor Edmund M. Clarke. Clarke was impressed with Lu's questions, and invited him to apply for a PhD at Carnegie Mellon. Clarke even offered to waive the $45 application fee that Lu says he could never have come up with. In 1996, Lu was graduated with his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon.

Lu, aged 47 in August, 2009, worked first in one of IBM's research labs 1996-98, then joined Yahoo!, eventually rising to manage 3,000 engineers and the development of search and search advertising technologies for the company. Lu's departure from Yahoo! in mid-2008 was long-planned, and he was contemplating opportunities in venture capital and even thinking of returning to China. However, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer personally recruited him to join the software giant. After joining Microsoft, Lu along with Satya Nadella was instrumental in driving the partnership with Yahoo! in search and the launch of Bing. While Google is still expected to have double the market share of the newly combined Microsoft/Yahoo! search function, the overall Yahoo!/Bing initiative represents a substantial and expanded challenge to the market leader.