On Monday, Chinese search engine giant Baidu Inc. confirmed that the company's Chief Technology Officer, Yinan Li decided to resign for personal reasons, and the development has come a mere 10 days after the firm's Chief Operating Officer also resigned for "personal reasons".

No further details were disclosed by Baidu on the resignations of both Mr. Li and Chief Operating Officer Peng Ye, and neither have any replacement been announced yet. However, when the company had announced Mr. Ye's resignation on January 08, it had said that it is looking to promote Haoyu Shen from Vice President of Business Operations to Senior Vice President and Zhan Wang, Senior Director of Business Products, to Vice President.

A few expert market watchers have speculated that the resignations might just be linked to Baidu's somewhat struggled transition to a whole new advertising system, christened Phoenix Next.

"There are signs the transition to Phoenix Nest may not be going as well as originally anticipated. That was a welcome surprise to Baidu", said Nomura Securities analyst Jin Yoon, while also stressing that there are very slim chances that the step downs have anything to do with the uproar currently going on at Google China. Last week, the search engine major of the world had announced that it might pull out of the Chinese market altogether.