Tencent's fiasco: Where is the search lost?

　　

Author: Guo

Tencent's fiasco: Where is the search lost? Search for countless changes this year, was split into other Tencent division, several senior executives have left, micro-blog news that the staff loss has reached 40%. Once a few years of landscape investment, has also caused the tension of Baidu, search search why will come to this step today?

I'll talk about my opinion.

　The new architecture in the dream

Wu, the former vice president of Tencent, who was dug by Tencent to be responsible for the search business, has mentioned in countless places the new architecture of search searches, hoping to reverse the situation through the new architecture. In an interview with Sina Technology in August this year, he said, "the successor to the market must be more essential than the previous company and bring new value to the user." The so-called realm, is to see far, see the future, guide users, rather than simply cater to users. "-presumably, the new structure is the basic work he thinks Tencent needs to do in order to have a" substantial improvement ".

　What is the situation of this new structure?

Search of the new structure of the whole idea from Google, it will be a large number of servers integrated, set up a cloud service platform, through this platform to provide computing and storage resources, it can intelligently dispatch and management of various services and applications. It can be said that the size of the platform and Technology is currently the domestic Internet companies are the premier.

I have to say, this new architecture sustenance Wu as a technology "Montana" an ideal, looks very dreamy, but in the actual operation of the enterprise encountered the following problems:

★ The development cycle is extremely long, which takes up nearly 2 years for most of the researchers, while the improvement of the existing system is nearly stagnant, and 2 years is long and valuable for internet companies.

★ The new system and the old system can not be compatible, all the underlying code will be on the new platform for redevelopment, at the same time, in order to excessive acquisition of thousands of servers, the cost is extremely high.

★ The new architecture is only the update of the underlying platform, and can not ultimately solve the user experience problems, the user experience requires countless top of the algorithm to continuously improve and improve the iterative.

★ New architecture because of the complexity of the technology, development is difficult, very easy to have more bugs, from the completion of development to complete stable and reliable still need a certain period.

Search the new structure in the beginning of the latest version of the news search in the test water, but the system is still improving, after the delay has not been applied to large search, until Wu left, still did not successfully online, and this has consumed most of his energy.

　　Weak search Quality

Sogou released the evaluation report, 3,601 online its search quality is more than search, and I from a number of other search engine companies to evaluate the conclusion, search quality performance is not too ideal. This and search the scale of the investment is obviously not consistent, I feel from a lot of debris information, search product quality is weak, to a certain extent, from the internal culture and atmosphere of the problem, not the drill, no cohesion.

Zhou Hongyi has said that "the worst way is to change a set of people to change the technology, disparage each other, always think of their best technology, which is why some search companies do not", it refers to is the search. Search inside faction is already in the industry open secret, many are intelligent, have their own ideas, can not twist into Yigujin, make the internal friction is extremely serious.

In the Sogou, many people are the search quality as their "lifeblood", when the case of bad, racking their brains not to sleep also want to think of solutions. When there is a problem on the line, you have to disregard the fastest speed to correct the line to ensure the user experience. But in the search, the overall lack of such a spirit, even if the impact of a very large problem, the one-month delay, even to "such a new structure on the line", are very normal things.

To improve the search experience, need countless sub technology continuous iteration and improvement, including participle, go word, synonym, sorting, intent to identify, cheat, link analysis, want to do not a day of work, many are drudgery, are countless very small or less than 0.1% of the Ascension heap out. And because of this poor visibility, product technology is not willing to spend energy to research, and is willing to do the open platform and other new products, finished directly can be demonstrated.

　　Out of control costs

Although the above list of the new architecture is not successful, the search quality is not high, but I always believe that the search to the present step, the biggest problem is not a technical problem, but the cost is completely out of control.

Tencent in order to develop search, recruited a large number of talent, many have made a very high salary, staff size and investment even and Baidu very close, put even more than today's Sogou and 360. And the staff also distributed in Beijing, Shenzhen and even the United States and other regions, greatly increasing the cost of communication.

In the machine input, because of the old structure of the search for more general performance, processing the same request to use more machines than Sogou, and for the new architecture and one-time investment of thousands of machines, in the single flow processing costs higher than competitors.

Similarly, search in order to be able to quickly occupy the market, and retain advertisers, put a lot of money to buy traffic, 2011 has organized a large-scale "dog action" against Sogou, but also bled to preempt the fast-sowing channel. However, the ability to search the liquidity, but can not support the flow of the purchase of large-scale investment, it may be said to buy more thanks to the more, when the loss, all the previous investment has become a bubble.

Buy the flow in addition to pull high cost, for search products is also harmful to the benefit, on this point, Wu himself also talked about:

When a non-search company enters the search field, most are too greedy for market share, and find some useless traffic to sucks, such as Bing to use Office and Windows Help as a search, to account for traffic, which, in our words, is the strong pull traffic, rather than users like, The use of their own generation, a long time users will be annoyed, there will be side effects. When I took over Tencent two years ago, I found that similar problems were very serious, and in the first half of this year, we have removed these flows from the assessment targets, thus focusing on the real search for meaningful users. These are the insights into the realm of search.

In the middle of the 2011, the author has estimated, compared to sogou, search the human cost of about 5-10 times, the machine cost about 3 times times, and the ability to become a gap, so that the purchase flow loss is larger, and no Sogou browser can get better income of its own channels. Sogou in the low-cost operation, finally reached a break-even, for spending money on the search, to achieve this goal can be said to be a distant future.

In a lot of news can be seen, search for a few years to Tencent lost 2 billion, more importantly, in the shadow of the giant Baidu, as well as Sogou and 360 of the attack, even if the big investment, but also see too much improvement in the hope. It can be said that Wu in technology, laid a good foundation, cloth a bureau, but Tencent is difficult to give him time.