China's top search engine, Baidu's chief technology officer, Yinan Li resigned from the job citing personal reasons after the chief operating officer Ye Peng had left the company less than two weeks ago also on personal reasons.

Baidu is China's leading search engine provider and is expected to raise its market share if the search engine major Google decides to quit the country.

Robin Li, Baidu's Chairman and CEO said, "We appreciate all that Yinan has contributed to Baidu and we wish him every success in his future endeavors."

Ye worked with for Baidu for two years after he had served as country general manager for Apple Inc. in China while Li was associated with the company for 14 months after she worked for Huawei Technologies as vice president.

Reports allege that the resignations are due to a new advertising tool that Baidu has struggled with.

In another development, a cyber attack which had left Baidu's search engine unusable was reported on January 12. Some users saw a banner of "Iranian Cyber Army" while attempting to visit Baidu's home page.

Baidu competes with Yahoo! China, Google. cn, and Microsoft's Bing in the growing Chinese internet market. The company is controlled by the Chinese communist regime with strick cencorships.

Baidu is listed in Nasdaq and is among the companies in Nasdaq 100 index. The shares of the company increased 0.74 percent or by $3.45 on NASDAQ last Friday.