A Look at Chinese Search Engine Sogou
December 25, 2017
An article at Search Engine Watch draws our attention to one overseas search contender—“What Do You Need to Know About Chinese Search Engine Sogou?” Sogu recently announced terms for a proposed IPO, so writer Rebecca Sentance provides a primer on the company. She begins with some background—the platform was launched in 2004, and the name translates to “searching dog.” She also delves into the not-so-clear issue of where Sogu stands in relation to China’s top search engine, Baidu, and some other contenders for the second-place, so see the article for those details.
I was interested in what Sentance writes about Sogou’s use of AI and natural language search:
It also plans to shift its emphasis from more traditional keyword-based search to answer questions, in line with the trend towards natural language search prompted by the rise of voice search and digital assistants. Sogou has joined major search players such as Bing, Baidu and of course Google in investing in artificial intelligence, but its small size may put it at a disadvantage. A huge search engine like Baidu, with an average of more than 583 million searches per day, has access to reams more data with which to teach its machine learning algorithms.
But Sogou has an ace up its sleeve: it is the only search engine formally allowed to access public messages on WeChat – a massive source of data that will be particularly beneficial for natural language processing. Plus, as I touched on earlier, language is something of a specialty area for Sogou, as Sogou Pinyin gives it a huge store of language data with which to work. Sogou also has ambitious plans to bring foreign-language results to Chinese audiences via its translation technology, which will allow consumers to search the English-speaking web using Mandarin search terms.
The article wraps up by looking at Sogou’s potential effect on search markets; basically, it could have a large impact within China, especially if Baidu keeps experiencing controversy. For the rest of the world, though, the impact should be minimal. Nevertheless, this is one company worth keeping an eye on.
Cynthia Murrell, December 25, 2017
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