Tencent Soso

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

~ the last words ~

Tencent Soso was china-only at the platform layer. The chinese search market in 2006 was already a baidu monoculture for western-blocked reasons that did not apply outside china. I never typed soso.com into a browser, and the only time i thought about it was when reading about why baidu still owned the chinese search market years after google left.

Tencent launched it in march 2006. The reasoning was straightforward. Tencent already had qq, the dominant chinese instant messenger of that era, with hundreds of millions of accounts. Adding a search box to qq seemed like the easiest way to get search market share. The search box was added. The market share did not really follow.

Soso was a competent search engine. It had image search, news search, music search, the usual late-2000s feature stack. It just never beat baidu on result quality or speed for chinese-language queries, and it never beat google for the small population of chinese users who still managed to reach google through the firewall.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

Operationally soso was tencent's bet that qq's distribution would make search market share easy. The bet was wrong. Chinese users would type a query into the qq search box if it was convenient, but for any serious lookup they switched to baidu.com. The data shows tencent at roughly 5 to 7 percent of the chinese search market in 2012, with baidu well above 60 percent.

Tencent's own product portfolio did not help. The company was busy with qq, weixin which became wechat, and the games business. Search was a side project that needed full attention to dent baidu, and it never got that attention.

~ the fall ~

By 2013 the calculation was clear. Tencent could keep burning cash on a search engine that was not catching baidu, or it could buy a stake in someone else's search engine that already had momentum. Sohu owned sogou, the second-place chinese search engine, which was also losing to baidu but losing slower and with better technology.

On 16 september 2013 tencent invested 448 million dollars in sogou for a 36.5 percent stake. As part of the deal soso was folded into sogou. The combined entity had about 15 percent of the chinese search market, still behind baidu but actually competitive. Tencent's qq browser search and qq home page search both redirected to sogou. The soso brand was retired.

~ what it became ~

Sogou kept growing through the 2010s. In 2017 it ipo'd on the new york stock exchange. In 2020 tencent announced it would acquire the rest of sogou and take it private, valuing the company at about 3.5 billion dollars. The merger closed in 2021 and sogou became a wholly-owned tencent subsidiary.

So the actual end of soso was being absorbed twice. Once in 2013 when it became sogou. Then again in 2021 when sogou became fully tencent. The soso brand has been dead for over a decade, but the engineering and the team mostly went on inside the larger sogou-then-tencent stack.

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