Past and Present of search engines

Sohu is China's first classified search engine website. Maybe Zhang Chaoyang didn't realize that the search market potential was so huge at the time. After that, Sohu has transformed itself into a portal content website, which is hard to beat Sina, until now.

Then, when the rise of Baidu surpassed Sina Sohu's revenue and market value, the Giants woke up. They lost their early "baby" and began to turn around to develop Sogou, but it cannot catch up with Baidu.

"If you do not make mistakes, Sohu, who has already entered the Internet industry 10 years ago, should be dedicated to the Internet ." In 2008, at the 10th anniversary of Sohu's founding, Zhang Chaoyang, chairman and CEO of Sohu Board of Directors, said.

Foreign innovator

There has never been a miracle in the Internet industry, but if we talk about the contribution to human history, search engines are undoubtedly one of the most exciting business models on the Internet.

15 years ago, in 1994, Jerry Yang, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, and his fellow Felo developed a searcher software for learning convenience. The software was named "Jerry World Guide ", the prototype of this search engine has created Yahoo, the first Internet miracle on Wall Street.

Later, inspired by Yahoo's miracle, many search engine companies like Infoseek, AltaVista, and Excite appeared in the United States, but since the internet itself was not developed at that time, none of these explorers found a mature profit model, which was a pioneer until Google was born in September 7, 1998.

Although search engine companies were not valued at the time and Yahoo began to develop in a diversified manner, Google's founders, Larry pages and sergib Blin, insisted on setting up the company at $0.1 million.

Since then, Google has grown into the world's largest Internet company by relying on the keyword search advertisement model and its powerful technical strength. As the most valuable Internet company in the world, Google's market value at its highest has exceeded $200 billion, surpassing other major competitors. More importantly, Google broke through the Wintel rules created by Microsoft and Intel in the PC age and became rule makers in the Internet age.

Chinese imitators

We pulled our sights back to China. In 1998, Zhang Chaoyang, who also had long hair, returned to China and founded Sohu, focusing on navigation and searching. At the same time, the spirit of the Internet also entered China along with Zhang Chaoyang, playing a legend of wealth story on this yellow land.

In 1999, Infoseek engineer Li Yanhong (Li Yanhong news, Li Yanhong said) and his friend Xu Yong returned to China and they set up Baidu. At the beginning, Chinese internet entrepreneurs learned more about the U.S. model and sought the development prospects of being acquired or independently listed. Unlike Zhang's learning about Yahoo's business model, Li Yanhong is referring to Google's successful experience.

Like Google, in today's big information explosion, Baidu has relied on a single business model to become China's most powerful Internet company, with its market capitalization hitting $15 billion.

Future trends

Search engines are leading the IT industry from one era to another and changing the lives of everyone.

In 1981, IBM launched a cheap PC for families, offices, and schools. This was rated by business weekly as the greatest invention of mankind in the past 75 years.

Since then, Microsoft, as a symbol of the times, has sold software in its business model through the software Authorization model.

Today, Google's age is to put software on the Internet so that users can use it for free and make money by publishing advertisements.

In the Google age, operating systems are no longer users' portals. On the contrary, users spend most of their time on browsers and searches to find information on the vast Internet, and directly process data on the internet. Therefore, all Google's efforts are to serve this portal.

Google's dream is to "integrate global information", which will be distributed all over the world and all the information that can be digitalized, in different languages, formats, types, and versions, after analysis and processing, a simple "plug" is provided to users to turn the Earth into a global village.

Currently, in addition to investing heavily in R & D of the underlying architecture "cloud computing", Google is one of the main areas of product R & D in integrated search, you can display information in different formats such as images, videos, and text on a search page. In addition, Google has invested heavily in machine translation, allowing a person to easily understand information in different languages around the world without having to understand too many foreign languages.

Google has invested a lot of energy in the mobile phone operating system and mobile search. As mobile phone functions become more and more powerful, its functions as an information processing terminal become more and more prominent. Google hopes that after the PC, it also occupies this larger market.