SoGou Chinese Search Engine – Walkin’ The Search Dog
SOHU.COM Inc. today unveiled its all-inclusive, proprietary search engine under the new brand name SoGou, which means ‘Search Dog’ in Chinese.
”We are now introducing the new ‘Third Generation’ interactive search, or ‘3G-Search’ in China. We have built on our core search competence to deliver this new way of search in the fast growing Chinese market that has quickly come to critically rely on the Internet as the key source of daily information needs,” said Charles Zhang, Chairman and CEO of SOHU.
The new search engine performs a pioneering interactive search through a built-in cutting-edge algorithm that combines the results generated from the hundreds of thousands of manually selected high-quality websites of SOHU’s directory with hundreds of millions of pages that the engine searched from the World Wide Web. The user is taken through a fast and convenient interactive process to arrive at the most relevant selection of the integrated website and page search results.
SOHU, which means ‘Search Fox’ in Chinese, started as a search engine seven years ago with a proprietary directory, but has since evolved into a comprehensive portal inclusive of communication, information, media and entertainment offerings to Chinese Internet users under that brand name. To have a direct appeal to Internet users when they do online search, the newly launched search engine has been named SoGou on a separate domain www.sogou.com
Online search marketing has great growth potential in China. Among the 21.6 million SMEs in China, only about 1.2% have adopted search engines as a marketing method, according to the 2003 Annual Report on Search Engine Marketing produced by Shanghai research company iResearch. Booming Internet usage, a burgeoning online advertising market and promising growth in e- commerce are likely to convince more businesses to join the ranks of the businesses that market themselves via sponsored online search.
”We are confident that our current and new advertisers will realize the significant value of the highly targeted marketing and highly relevant search experience enabled by SoGou,” said Jianjun Wang, Vice-president of SOHU for Search Business.
