Chapter 68 The rivers and lakes that the duo will search

The commercial value of search has been infinitely magnified with the listing of Baidu, so this world has become as hot as instant messaging in 2003.Before starting to describe a melee search arena, first explain the value of search.In the initial stage of the development of Hongmeng on the world Internet, the value of search has been highly recognized. "In the history of mankind, there have never been so many people who can find out so much information on themselves, about so many people, things, and things." Thomas Friedman said.Thomas Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times and has won three Pulitzer Prizes.In his bestseller ("The World is Flat"), he included information seeking as one of the ten bulldozers that flattened the world.Our lives have been completely changed by search. “The most respected professor at Stanford University 10 years ago was not as convenient and rich in obtaining information as the person sitting in an Internet cafe in Bangladesh today.” Said Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google.

In 1990, a student named Alan Emtage invented the Archie program in the dormitory of the University of Montreal, Canada, so that people can find the files they need on the nascent computer network. This is the pioneer of search engines in the modern sense. .Because Archie is very popular with users, inspired by it, some programmers continue to improve the traditional spider program, so various new search tools and search engines emerge one after another. As for the search engine in the modern sense, it first appeared on July 20, 1994.At that time, Michael Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States integrated the spider program into its indexing program, creating what is now known as Lycos.In addition to correlation sorting, Lycos also provides prefix matching and character similarity restrictions. It is the first to use webpage automatic summarization in search results, and its biggest advantage is that the data volume has reached 54,000. Infoseek is another important search engine. Its friendly user interface and a large number of additional services make it popular and praised by people.It is worth mentioning that Robin Li, who later founded Baidu, was originally an engineer at Infoseek.

In April of the same year, two young Ph.D. students from the Department of Electrical Engineering of Stanford University, David Filo (David Filo) and Chinese-American Yang Zhiyuan (Gerry Yang) met, and began to organize the website directory on the campus. They wanted to All Internet users are better able to find relevant information.Therefore, they co-founded the super directory index Yahoo. The original meaning of this word is a monster in a fairy tale, and the Chinese name is "Yahoo".Since then, Yahoo has successively provided search engine services to Altavista, Inktomi and other websites, gradually perfected all the content of the search engine, and successfully made the concept of search engine deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.Since then, search engines have entered a period of rapid development.

In the early days, the search engine market was in chaos, and no one knew how to make profits.Until the arrival of the iconic moment in 1997, the search engine began to shift from a technology dispute to a business model competition. In an instant, people seemed to realize that search engines are neighbors of online media, and they are only separated by a wall.What knocked down this wall was the introduction of the portal concept.And it was Jerry Yang who first realized that search engines were the tip of the new media iceberg. Jerry Yang believes that brand promotion is the first priority in order to attract users, and he himself is so fanatical about brand promotion that he spent 5 million US dollars on TV commercials from the very beginning, which became the largest one ever launched by the company at that time. a check.Stock quotes, maps, chat rooms, news, weather forecasts, sports news, yellow pages, etc., make users dizzy.

By the end of 1997, Yahoo had more daily visits than all of its competitors combined.Yahoo has a complete set of marketing strategies, many admirable management talents, and more than 100 million US dollars in cash.At the end of the year, for Jerry Yang, there was another very good news, that is, the market capitalization of Yahoo surpassed the browser king Netscape for the first time, and the stock price of Yahoo also seemed to be on a rocket. It has been said that one year of the Internet is equivalent to seven years of traditional industries.Driven by the myth of Yahoo and the rising star Google, the global capital market has shown extraordinary enthusiasm for search engine companies.When the time came to 2004, all forces seemed to have seen the potential of search: PPC could bring real money, and the future combination of search and e-commerce would create more powerful business opportunities.

The enthusiasm of all forces for search seems to have reached its peak when Baidu went public.Baidu was listed on Nasdaq in the United States in August 2005. On that day, the stock price broke through 150 US dollars, creating another miracle.One of the significance of Baidu's successful listing is that it has finally proved that search is the fourth pot of gold in the Internet industry after online advertising, wireless value-added and games. That year, Jerry Yang saw that Yahoo China had achieved nothing in the Chinese market, so he made up his mind to hand over Yahoo China to Jack Ma for management, and at the same time gave hundreds of millions of dollars in support.Therefore, Yahoo and Alibaba, the largest acquisition transaction in the history of the Chinese Internet, were also born. On the afternoon of August 9, 2006, nearly a year after Alibaba acquired Yahoo China, Jack Ma admitted for the first time that the "Yaba cooperation" was not successful with his unique "Ma's humor". On September 9, 2006, in front of Jerry Yang, Jack Ma confessed his confusion about the direction of Yahoo China's development.

Since then, the awkward situation of Yahoo China still exists.Ma Yun is not very clear about what Yahoo China searches for, and it is difficult to break through the lackluster model of Yahoo China.He didn't seem to see a glimmer of light until the acquisition of Koubei, Yahoo's Koubei focused on life search.However, this integration is just an attempt, and the profit model of life search is not yet mature. Whether China Yahoo can seize the opportunity to successfully transform itself still needs time to test. The turmoil in the market has also stimulated Google's previous attitude of letting go of the Chinese market, especially in the absence of any market operations before, Google has already obtained more than 1.2 million US dollars in revenue in the Chinese market in 2003.This eventually prompted Google headquarters to decide to substantially enter the Chinese market five years after the launch of the Chinese version.

Compared with before Google entered China, the Chinese version of Google developed by five engineers in Silicon Valley in 2000 took less than two years to defeat Yahoo and captured a quarter of China. Searching for users, it's amazing to think about it.However, after 2002, local Chinese netizens began to experience disconnection when browsing the Chinese version of Google; during the same period, Baidu launched an independent search engine and came from behind. On July 20, 2005, Google announced that it would set up a product R&D center in China in the third quarter of that year. Kai-fu Lee, the former global vice president of Microsoft, would be in charge of the operation of Google's China R&D center and serve as the president of Google China.And this summer, Lee Kai-fu had just finished his lawsuit with Microsoft and started recruiting troops in China. After the opening of Google's campaign in the Chinese market, the first thing Kai-fu Lee did was to accelerate the formation of a team and launch localized products.Since the second half of 2005, Kai-fu Lee has recruited nearly 100 outstanding college graduates by virtue of the college network he established at Microsoft. Not only that, Google China has also launched news search, local search, academic search, university search, Products like Desktop Search.

In 2005, China's search market was divided into three parts.According to statistics from iResearch: Baidu, Google, and Yahoo have a market share of 37:23:21.However, Yahoo’s confusion after Ma Yun took over caused Yahoo’s market share to drop to about 5% by the end of 2006. When a company hands over about 16% of the market share, there is always a profit for the fisherman. Google has a chance.However, Kai-fu Lee and Microsoft have been entangled in the lawsuit for half a year, leaving Google with no time to care.As a result, Baidu took over all the users that Yahoo lost.The market share of Baidu and Google became 53:23 in a very short period of time.

In China's domestic market, Google seems to be growing slowly and slowly in its competition with Baidu.But on a global scale, Google continues to create myths. In 2007, Google’s market value surpassed Yahoo, the Internet leader, with operating income of US$16.6 billion, 2.4 times that of Yahoo, and operating profit of US$5 billion, seven times that of Yahoo; the annual growth of Google’s operating income in that year was 56%. Yahoo's annual growth is only 8%. The industry began to speculate: In the Internet world that advocates freedom, will Google dominate everything like Microsoft in the software field? Everything is unknown, and only time will tell.

Not only Yahoo and Google have gone from outside to inside, but many portal websites such as Sohu and Sina have also joined in the penetration of the search market.In China, portal websites have a search function at the beginning of their birth, because Yahoo, one of the originators of global business websites, is a search website.For example, search was the housekeeping skill of Sohu in the early days, which can be seen from its name. Zhang Chaoyang originally wanted to make a search website like Yahoo.And Sina's search function was also all the rage back then.After a while, Search did not develop a viable profit model in China.Therefore, search has become an indispensable basic function and free service of portal websites. For portals, what they entered is a strange and extremely fierce market.Although most of the portals started with search services, before the search business model was formed, domestic portals contracted this "chicken rib" service to Baidu and Google one after another.Now that it is back to its old business, search has become an unfamiliar business for portals.In addition, in the current domestic search market, many industry leaders have formed. At a time when search is being hyped like a raging fire, portals are struggling.The wireless value-added income of domestic portals, which had maintained rapid growth, showed weakness throughout 2004.Seeing the attractive development prospects and huge commercial interests of the search market, portals have tried the water one after another. "China's search engine market has only just begun." Almost every latecomer to intrusion search will explain the reason for his late arrival in this way. In March 2004, Zhang Chaoyang, CEO of Sohu, said at a party: "We are developing our own search engine and will gradually stop cooperating with third-party search engines." Domestic portals' ambitions for the search market have been fully revealed.Then on August 3, 2004, Sohu launched Sogou, a search engine with independent intellectual property rights, with great fanfare. Just a year after Zhang Chaoyang tried the search engine, Sina also launched its own search engine. In May 2005, Sina disclosed in its first quarter financial report that it had completed the research and development of its first self-developed search engine. On June 30, 2005, Sina launched its own search brand, iAsk, with great fanfare.Ended the development model mainly relying on cooperation with search technology suppliers, and only retained the cooperation with China Search in MP3 Search. Netease Youdao came out at the end of 2007, obviously a latecomer in this field.However, Ding Lei said: "We will make Youdao the number one search engine in Chinese within three years", and everyone feels a little sluggish about such bold words. The performance of Sina's "Aiwen" in the future has always maintained a sloppy style in the eyes of industry insiders.In addition to Sogou, almost all search engines have cooperated with Sina.NetEase Youdao wants to surpass Baidu and become the number one in Chinese search. It can be said that the road is long and the night is long.