Jike

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

~ the goodbye ~

A search engine gets about four queries out of you before you decide. You type the thing you were going to type anyway, you look at the first screen, and then either you come back tomorrow or you never think about it again. Money does not reach that decision. Jike had a great deal of money.

It opened on 20 June 2010 under the name People's Search, owned by the People's Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. That September the job of general manager went to Deng Yaping, who had won four Olympic golds at table tennis before taking a doctorate at Cambridge. The appointment was the strategy in miniature: a national champion put in front of a national product, at a point when the state had decided that search was too important to leave to a private company.

On 20 June 2011, a year to the day after launch, the site was renamed Jike, which reads roughly as "instant". The interface was the interface everyone uses, a box in the middle of a white page, because there is only one way to draw that. Behind it sat real infrastructure and a budget that Chinese reporting later put at two billion yuan. Deng was still being asked about that number years after she left.

Turkey ran a version of the same idea later. Turkcell put out Yaani in 2017 with the familiar framing, a search engine of our own, and the country went on typing into the box it already had. Watching that from close up teaches you what Jike found out first. A default is not a market you can enter. It is a decision somebody else made for you years earlier, and it does not get revisited just because a new option is available and patriotic.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

By 2012 the foreign tech press was writing Jike up as a genuine third contender, the state's answer to Baidu and to whatever remained of Google in China. It had the money and the political cover, plus a mandate to provide search that respected intellectual property, which was a pointed thing to say in a market where Baidu's music search had spent years pointing at other people's files.

It also got studied, which is rarer. Academics ran the same queries through it and through Baidu, with Google as the outside reference, and what they found in Jike's results was a heavy pull toward domestic sources. Foreign Policy summed the whole project up in a 2013 headline that stuck to it permanently, calling it the little search engine that couldn't.

~ the decline ~

The share never moved. Not slightly, not in the encouraging direction that lets a project argue for another year of funding. Users had Baidu, and the ones who wanted something else went to Sogou or to 360, both of which were run by people whose survival depended on being chosen.

Meanwhile the state was running two of these. Xinhua and China Mobile had launched Panguso in February 2011, four months before the Jike rebrand, so the government was competing against itself for an audience that had shown up for neither. Sometime in November 2013 Jike stopped answering. The queries were redirected to Panguso, quietly, without an announcement worth the name.

~ what it became ~

On 21 March 2014 the two were merged into China Search, jointly owned by seven state media organizations, which is the sort of ownership structure that tells you nobody wanted to be responsible for it alone. China Search is still there. It is still not anyone's default.

The lesson Jike paid two billion yuan for is one that keeps getting bought again. You can hire the engineers and buy the advertising, and none of it produces the thing you actually needed, which was for a hundred million people to change a keystroke they stopped thinking about in 2005.

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