[6] During his tenure as CEO of Baidu, Li has been criticized for a number of controversies, including the death of Wei Zexi, advertising of unqualified hospitals on Tieba, and ad fraud.

[8] In 1994, Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.

In 1996, while at IDD, Li created the Rankdex site-scoring algorithm for search engine page ranking.

[3][10][11][12][13] Google cofounder Larry Page filed a patent for the PageRank search algorithm, two years later in 1998, which references Li's work on RankDex.

[19] In April 2004, he was named in the second session of "Chinese Software Ten Outstanding Young Persons".

[21] In August 2014, Li was appointed by the United Nations Secretary General as co-chair of the Independent Expert Advisory Group on Data Revolution for Sustainable Development.