Youdao, the Chinese search engine by NetEase claims 1% of China’s search market, according to it’s SVP Zhou Feng.
Zhou said that NetEase’s Youdao will be more focusing on product rather than some sort of concept. He believed that as long as the service attracts a large amount of users, making money off it with 3 ~ 5 years won’t be something that difficult.
Particularly, Youdao’s Shopping Search which is a direct competitor of Taobao’s Etao has already signed up 1000+ Chinese ecommerce company to aggregate their items across the web. The price engine can help users save money and find better bargain.
Youdao Shopping Search
Zhou revealed that there’ll be a big surprise coming up regarding Shopping Search in the third quarter, he didn’t go into details.
According to iResearch, in the first quarter of this year Baidu, Google and Sogou ranked top three in China’s search market with a market share of 77.6%, 17.8% and 2.7% respectively. Soso came in fourth with 1.5% while NetEase’s Youdao falls under the “Others” category.
As Baidu continued to cement its position in the market and Sogou managed to gobble up a bigger chunk of the area, smaller rivals like Soso and Youdao don’t really have decent opportunities if they still rival them in an all-around way.
NetEase launched Youdao in late 2007 to compete in the heated market.
I think you made a mistake. Sogou’s market share is 2.7% instead of 12.7%.