Gougou

» see gougou.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Xunlei was founded in Shenzhen in 2003 by Zou Shenglong, and its download manager, known in English as Thunder, became one of the most used in mainland China. The client could pull one file from several web servers and from other users at the same time. What it lacked was a way to find the file in the first place. Gougou, which means doggy, was that missing piece: a search engine whose results were download addresses, each one ready to hand to the Xunlei client.

It opened in June 2007 under the title Gougou entertainment search engine, with the line "Xunlei's entertainment search" beside the logo. The front page had one tab for films and another for BitTorrent files, with the rest of the categories behind a More link. An industry piece carried by the Internet Society of China on 2 August 2007 said the film and TV search alone had reached nearly five million clicks a day within a month, and put the number of Xunlei client users behind it at 160 million.

Gougou closed in the last days of December 2012. The Office of the US Trade Representative had published its Notorious Markets list on 13 December with Gougou on it, and NetEase reported the site's final notice on the 26th. Tech in Asia rendered that notice in English a week later: "Gougou.com has been closed down. Thank you all for your support, and we are sorry for any inconvenience."

~ the dossier ~

~ a reader before it was a search engine ~

The domain is older than the product. NetEase dates the registration of gougou.com to June 2000, and through 2006 the Wayback Machine shows it serving a web RSS reader that described itself as portable. In May 2007 the page shrank to two lines saying the site was about to undergo major improvements and the feed reader had moved to rss.gougou.com. The capture of 7 June 2007 is the Xunlei search page. Chinese encyclopedia entries give 1 June as the opening day, which fits the gap.

That month I was a university student in Turkey on TTNet broadband, and the download tools on my machine spoke English. Xunlei and its search engine were written in Chinese for Chinese connections, and nothing about them crossed into the Turkish internet I was using.

~ one line in a prospectus ~

Xunlei filed to list on Nasdaq on 8 June 2011. Marbridge Consulting read the prospectus the next day and pulled out two things. The company faced 33 pending copyright suits with claims of about 21.8 million dollars, and in December 2010 it had sold the Gougou domain and trademark, along with the software copyright, to an undisclosed third party for 100,000 yuan, roughly 15,000 dollars. Chinese regulators had not waited for the filing: on 29 April 2011 the Ministry of Culture and the broadcasting regulator ordered the site closed for rectification over copyright. The sale did not change how anyone described it. NetEase still called Gougou a Xunlei property in December 2012, and the listing itself did not go ahead.

~ two notices in a month ~

On 26 November 2012 the site posted that service was suspended for the time being. It came back in early December after what it called system adjustments. The American list of the 13th named 34 markets, 17 of them online. Taobao came off the list that year and Sogou was dropped with credit for notable efforts. Gougou was one of the 17. Radio Free Asia quoted analysts who read the closure as clearing the road for a second attempt at a US listing.

The next edition of the list, published on 12 February 2014, noted that Xunlei had shut Gougou down. Xunlei went public on Nasdaq on 24 June 2014, selling 7.315 million American depositary shares at 12 dollars each and raising just under 88 million. The address gougou.com answers today with a hosting placeholder that reads "Domain not configured".

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