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Sohu Alibaba Group heighten China local search engine tension

Posted by Aliuser on Aug 10, 2010 in Alibaba Search

Nasdaq-listed Sohu.com, China eCommerce operator Alibaba Group and Yunfeng, a fund co-founded by Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma, had agreed to acquire a 16 per cent stake in Sogou (搜狗), its search engine.

Chinese search engine Sogou was launched 4 August 2004, covering search text, images, music, and maps. As of April 2010, it has a rank of 121 in Alexa‘s internet rankings.^[2] Sogou provides an index of up to 10 billion web pages, according to Wikipedia.

Chinese-search-engine-Sogou-and-chairman-Zhang

Sohu.com delivered the announcement in Beijing unwrapping the strategic partnership. The agreement will strengthen Sohu’s position in capturing a larger slice of market share and enable Alibaba Group to take a more proactive role in developing search engine. Charles Zang, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Sohu.com is to own another 16 per cent of the new venture.

Alibaba’s resources will help the development of Sohu’s search engine,” Nelly Jin, an Internet analyst at research company iResearch in Beijing, said before the announcement.

Alibaba has the option of adopting Yahoo! Inc. search technology but it opts for Sohu’s search service instead. The initiative will pose a challenge to Baidu.com Currently, Alibaba Group’s Taobao.com stops Baidu from indexing its pages.

China’s number one search engine Baidu currently holds 70 per cent of online search market revenues in the second quarter according to research firm Analysys. . Google is back to China internet market with its ICP licence renewal a while ago.

Sohu.com Inc. (NASDAQ: SOHU) is China’s premier online brand and indispensable to the daily life of millions of Chinese, providing a network of web properties and community based/web 2.0 products which offer the vast Sohu user community a broad array of choices regarding information, entertainment and communication. Sohu has built one of the most comprehensive matrices of Chinese language web properties and proprietary search engines, consisting of the mass portal and leading online media destination www.sohu.com; interactive search engine www.sogou.com; #1 games information portal www.17173.com; the top real estate website www.focus.cn; #1 online alumni club www.chinaren.com; wireless value-added services provider www.goodfeel.com.cn; leading online mapping service provider www.go2map.com; and developer and operator of online games www.changyou.com.