**: Odd and even pie (ID: jioupai) Author: Guangchen Editor: Zhao.
In 2000, Robin Li and Xu Yong were founded in Zhongguancun, Beijing. In the 24 years since its inception, it has undergone a strategic evolution from a search giant to a mobile and AI leader.
At the beginning of its establishment, it positioned itself as a network service-oriented enterprise, and in 2005, it quickly beat Yahoo and Google China to grow into the world's largest Chinese search engine. At that time, its strategic focus was to provide search engine services in the B2B market. With the development of the Internet, it gradually turned to the B2C market and became the largest search engine provider in China. At this stage, by providing accurate search services, a large number of users have been accumulated, forming the foundation of the traffic empire.
With the advent of the mobile Internet era, the focus has shifted from the PC side to the mobile side, and a series of mobile applications and services have been launched to adapt to the changes in user behavior. At the same time, it has also begun to explore diversified businesses, including e-commerce, social networking and other fields. It tries to broaden the interactive scene through a strong search foundation, and then feeds back the search through rich and connected scenes.
In this development process, a complete and sophisticated full-text search engine has been established, in addition to web text, it also provides a variety of search products and services to meet the segmentation needs of users, such as ** search, news search, map search, etc.
According to data provided by Statcounter Global Stats, the global search engine market size has exceeded $100 billion by 2023, with Google and two companies accounting for more than 80% of the market share. In the Chinese search engine market, it has also dominated the list for a long time, with a market share of more than 80% at every turn, almost sweeping the entire market.
In fact, there was nothing wrong with every move. However, in the last five years, and especially in the last three years, there has been a lot of discussion on the Internet about whether the search is "ahead of the present and behind the future".
In fact, in recent years, the domestic search landscape is quietly changing. On the one hand, although it still maintains the complete suppression of old opponents such as 360 search and Sogou search. However, in the face of the strong impact of social giants Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and WeChat, it is difficult to completely align with each other for a while. The market is calling for the "three new search revolutions". On the other hand, AI technology is breaking the waves, and how to eat this wave of dividends is also a problem that every searcher is thinking about.
When faced with the question of the success or failure of industry competition, Robin Li once said, "Subversion may come from companies that are larger than us, but it is more likely to come from companies that are smaller than us." I'm always competing with bigger competitors than me in the process, and I'm not afraid of that. It's the ones that you don't usually pay attention to, and you think it's nothing, but in fact your judgment is wrong."
From this perspective, information and search are the basic elements of the Internet, and search and information needs are the basic needs of the Internet era. If we look at the ongoing competition in the search industry, we will find that the search wars in the Internet age are far from stopping and will never stop.
What is the position of the current "search players"?
New forces become a new search option?
In the past battlefield, the iron horse glacial river fell into a dream; On the battlefield today, the radio wave light array is open.
The search battlefield is changing with each passing day, and this sentence is quite appropriate to describe today's search market, because more and more people are finding that they use search less frequently, and instead Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat use it significantly more often when they search for themselves.
Take Xiaohongshu, the brightest performer, as an example, according to Questmobile data, Xiaohongshu, along with several other new ** platforms, has reached 10 deduplication active users8.8 billion, with a penetration rate of 889%。Although this data is the sum of several platforms, it can be seen that the overall user base of the new ** platform is very large.
If you are a junior who is preparing for the graduate school entrance examination and is not familiar with the relevant processes and preparation matters for the graduate school entrance examination, which platform will you search on? The odd-even faction threw this question at 50 college students, of whom 28 chose Xiaohongshu, 16, and 5 chose other software platforms. When asked what they chose to search for when they were preparing for the college entrance examination four years ago, 38 of them passed the search, ranging from 76% to 32%. It seems that the weight of search needs on specific questions has decreased significantly among younger people.
When asked why, the most common answer we hear is "convenience". Jiang Li, a senior in college, told the odd-even faction, "We basically use Xiaohongshu now, because it is much more convenient, encyclopedia, life depends on Xiaohongshu."
We open Xiaohongshu and search for the words related to "postgraduate entrance examination", which shows that there are more than 12.63 million notes, and the interface will automatically give various "personal experiences" about postgraduate entrance examinations.
Typing out the same terms in the search, the results obtained are as follows:
Almost all of the advertisements in the forefront are advertisements related to postgraduate entrance examinations, and only by pulling down a certain distance can we find some "postgraduate examination experience" and "postgraduate examination common sense" sandwiched between a series of advertisements.
Once upon a time, convenience has always been the main feature, but now it is clear that in the eyes of many people, Xiaohongshu is the best choice. and became the one who "became charming and charming".
In fact, objectively, Xiaohongshu now has a considerable user base, and most of them are young, energetic, with a stronger search willingness and stronger search potential.
According to statistics, at present, Xiaohongshu's monthly active users have reached 2600 million, with an average daily search query volume of nearly 300 million, and 60% of users will actively search for information. The post-90s generation accounts for 70%, the proportion of users in first- and second-tier cities reaches 50%, the ratio of men to women is 3:7, and there are 69 million sharers. The total daily average number of notes** in Xiaohongshu has reached 30 billion.
According to iiMedia Consulting, in the 2022 annual monthly active data of the app market in the communication and social category, Xiaohongshu has come to the fourth place, second only to WeChat, QQ and Weibo.
Some people even pointed out that the new character that Xiaohongshu wants to create is to let young users "ask Xiaohongshu when they are in trouble", which is tantamount to representing the basic disk that Xiaohongshu is eroding from the user's mind.
In this regard, Douyin and Xiaohongshu have the same thing. Whether it's Xiaohongshu or Douyin, they have almost the same structure and layout on the search page.
Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, when you enter the search interface of Xiaohongshu, it will be divided into three sections: History, Guess You Want to Search, and Xiaohongshu Hot Spots, which correspond to habits, preferences, and the public. Among them, the history is responsible for helping users quickly find the content they have searched before, and the main purpose is to awaken the user's search awareness, improve the user's search efficiency, help the user review the previous points of interest, and continue to explore related topics.
Guess what you want to search is a function based on algorithm recommendation, which uses the user's browsing history, search habits, and preferences to find out what the user may be interested in. Xiaohongshu's product label is "close to life, with warmth", which helps it to attract more ordinary user groups in terms of life services. Similarly, Douyin also provides users with personalized search suggestions through this function to increase user stickiness.
Hot information reflects the current hot topics or trends, which attract users to pay attention to and participate in social hot events. Both Douyin and Xiaohongshu include such features to enhance user engagement and timeliness.
It can be said that Xiaohongshu is on the pulse of today's netizens, but it is a bit off.
Finding a balance between content and commercialization
Xiaohongshu has a "newbie benefit".
Seeing the depth of the moat as a traditional search engine, Xiaohongshu has found another way.
For Xiaohongshu, its unique sense of community and user-generated content (UGC) ecology provides users with a different experience from traditional search engines.
Compared with the extensive information retrieval services provided, the content provided by Xiaohongshu is more vertical and in-depth.
When users use Xiaohongshu, they are often looking for specific content such as lifestyle, consumer product recommendations, or travel tips. For example, beauty, fashion, food, etc., the main content is generated by users, which ensures that the platform can obtain real-time and close to life massive information every day. Many users regard Xiaohongshu in these fields as a reference for decision-making of "planting grass" and "pulling weeds", which is difficult to match with traditional search engines. Coincidentally, this is exactly the shortcoming.
In fact, as a traditional search engine, it used to play more of a bridge role, and its core function was to connect users and information, and they connected the two by indexing content on the Internet, but they did not have a creative function themselves. As the amount of information grows, more and more data needs to be processed, and the pressure increases, resulting in a lot of irrelevant or low-quality content in search results, making it difficult for users to quickly find the information they need.
It's not that it doesn't realize that its own production of content is limited, it launched its own content creation platform Baijiahao many years ago, aiming to imitate Weibo. However, in terms of content distribution strategy, Baijiahao adopts the dual-engine driving model of "intelligent search + intelligent recommendation". This means that the content that users see is highly personalized, and the characteristics of the past are "large and complete", and the fine route taken by Baijiahao is obviously a little unsuitable on the platform where the "large and complete" tonality has been cultivated for more than ten years.
Users usually need to get answers, rather than processes, which results in the same article, Baijia often has the behavior of brushing comments, which is difficult to mobilize the enthusiasm of users to discuss and create an atmosphere for discussion.
On the other hand, social platforms such as WeChat and Douyin have formed their own content ecosystems, where users can complete the whole process from content acquisition to communication and sharing without jumping to other search engines, which poses a great challenge to the "search-click-answer" link scheme, which mainly relies on the "search-click-answer" link scheme.
If the content ecology is the sharp edge condensed by Xiaohongshu's differentiated advantages, then its own problem lies in tearing the hole with its own hands, and the reason for its increasing discomfort is the excessive proliferation of advertising and commercial content.
At the end of February, the company's 2023 financial report was announced, and the company's total revenue for the whole year of 2023 was 13459.8 billion yuan, of which advertising business revenue accounted for more than half. In the core revenue, the first marketing business provides more than seventy percent of the revenue, the significant growth of the marketing business at the same time, the intelligent cloud and other non-** marketing business has also achieved growth, will be in advertising and marketing, as well as the income statement in the dependence on advertising and marketing to the fullest.
Search itself cannot generate revenue, and it is the search add-on service that generates revenue, and the advertising business, as the pillar of revenue, has a negative impact on the user experience on the other hand while supporting its performance.
of algorithms are more inclined to promote paid content rather than based solely on the quality and relevance of the content. When a user searches for relevant information, but the search engine puts the ad in a prominent position in the results, it is not a good thing for the user's search efficiency and user experience.
There are usually two modes of ad delivery: search ads and in-feed ads. The strengths of sponsored ads are their broad reach, targeting, pay-per-performance, and management flexibility. This means that advertisers can target potential customers based on their search keywords and only pay when they click on an ad, which is a good service for advertisers, but it consumes a lot of users' search time.
How to better balance the release of commercialization and the sense of user experience has raised a big problem.
In fact, Xiaohongshu is now on the road of chasing commercialization, "Search is particularly important, and the value of search is also very high on Xiaohongshu." He Yi, founder of the domestic beauty brand East Beast, said that they have listed the search behavior on Xiaohongshu as the company's next key feature.
And Xiaohongshu COO Conan also confirmed that "the path and rhythm of our commercial construction are built along the commercial needs that emerge from the community ecology, and Xiaohongshu will continue to dig deep into various commercial values on the platform along the line of search."
Balancing the proportion of PGC (professionally produced content) and UGC (user-generated content) in the following exploration may be no less difficult than "a blank sheet of paper" for UGC-based Xiaohongshu.
In addition, Xiaohongshu's information coverage is relatively narrow, mainly focused on specific areas of interest, and is not suitable for extensive information searching. Therefore, the space left is quite large.
Outside of Xiaohongshu, there are other players who are potential opponents.
Douyin as today's traffic king, carrying the vast majority of traffic on the Internet, has long cultivated the habits of users under the flooding, catalyzed by today's short ** explosion, many people gradually transfer their habits from reading text to *** Douyin and rely on their own algorithm ability to grasp the user's acceptance of search results, match preferences, and provide information effortlessly. In Jiang Li's words: "Searching for hot words and hot stalks for new products on Douyin is really easy to use tips and content that I am interested in." ”
Douyin has now successfully incubated Douyin e-commerce, as the main pool for traffic monetization, Douyin's closed-loop ecology and "goods to find people" mechanism have successfully subverted the traditional "funnel model".
In the funnel model, the user needs to complete the transaction through several key links, such as **-click-visit-consultation-order, and in this process, the number of potential customers gradually decreases with each stage. Nowadays, the platform mechanism and AI technology have had a significant positive effect on the transaction conversion rate of users.
The diversion of WeChat search is all over the high-frequency social use scenarios such as chats, moments, and articles. Different from Xiaohongshu and Douyin, WeChat's social attributes have a wider range, in addition to life scenes, including work scenes, in addition, WeChat has confirmed that from search to application scenarios (especially small programs), advertising monetization methods are becoming more and more abundant, which makes it possible to guide conversion, build private domains, and make your own customer pool through search, which has become the standard configuration of various industries.
But like Xiaohongshu, whether they want to expand their search scope, whether they can afford to overload information, and then maintain user retention and gross margins at the same time will be new questions they need to clarify.
Exchange shrinkage for depth, search for betting on AI
In the past, there was no real sense of threat.
Take Sogou, which has long occupied the second place in the domestic search list, as an example, what it has the most is the function that it once had to support cross-platform search, and it can directly find the content of WeChat, Zhihu and other platforms, which has caused some trouble in the past, but these are far from threatening search.
Later, Quark, as a product that Alibaba had high hopes for, once supported a variety of search methods, including voice input retrieval and photo recognition search, and positioned its own products as "the best partner for finding resources". At first, Quark's approach did have a certain impact. But with the passage of time, the steel seal of the quark "resource app" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, which makes people who don't use quarks still don't use quarks, and people who use quarks only think of quarks when retrieving resources, and still choose when retrieving other information.
But no matter how hard the rock is, it is difficult to resist the waves washing away again and again. With the opening of the new era of search revolution in Xiaohongshu, WeChat, and Douyin, the sense of urgency is now on paper.
Just after the Spring Festival holiday, a series of actions were launched, the most notable of which was the return of the veteran: Zhao Shiqi, a former veteran who served as the head of the recommendation technology platform department, officially returned from Huawei to take charge of the search business. According to reports, in the new phase, he will focus on product innovation, and the focus of his work will be on the application of AI technology in search.
Once undoubtedly dominated the search engine hegemony, now when he wants to search, he still chooses to recall the old generals, which more or less implies dissatisfaction with the status quo.
In recent years, attitudes towards search have been rather subtle.
Since last year, the AI wave has begun to sweep the world. As a member of the first echelon of the domestic AI field, its roots in the development of generative AI can be traced back to 2010 or even longer. With more than ten years of first-mover advantage, it has the confidence to advertise itself as "the only company in China with a complete four-layer AI full-stack technology".
However, it is such a high-tech technology company, but for a long time in the past, people have been stamped as a "search app".
In fact, as a business that became famous in the early years, it can be said that "success also searches, and failure also searches". The success lies in the solidification of this image, which opened up the status and traffic of search in the early stage, and then pushed it to the forefront of the first generation of Internet giant "BAT", but in the later stage, it also firmly limited its expansion and penetration.
2019 was a year of critical change.
This year, there was the first quarterly loss and annual net profit loss since going public in 2005: a net loss of 327 yuan, an annual loss of 228.8 billion yuan. Also in January of this year, Robin Li first proposed his vision and clarified the overall strategy of "consolidating the mobile foundation and winning the AI era".
At that time, in the field of "rooted" search and information flow, facing the all-round attack of competitors such as Byte and Tencent with traffic, user advantages and content, and in the rapidly exploding field of short **, Douyin and Kuaishou took away the time and attention of most mobile phone users, which had the most violent impact on the mobile ecology. The core business needs to be more completely transformed in the direction of mobile Internet.
In February 2019, the most radical organizational change since its establishment was launched: vigorously promoting internal newcomers, introducing external talents, and launching a cadre rotation system. Shen Dou, who led the team and performed well in the information flow war with Toutiao, was the first batch of rotating executives promoted internally.
In May of that year, the 2019 Q1 financial report was announced, with a net loss of 32.7 billion yuan. As soon as the news came out, the stock price plummeted. Immediately afterwards, Xiang Hailong, who was considered "the least likely to move", resigned as senior vice president and president of the search company, and Shen Dou was promoted to senior vice president, fully responsible for the newly established mobile ecological business group (MEG), covering APP, search, information flow, mini program, Baijiahao, culture, education, digital entertainment, health, internationalization and other businesses.
In recent years, Zhang Yanji, the former head of search products, and Song Jian, the head of content ecology, have left one after another, and Xiao Yang, the former head of the search platform, has also been transferred to be responsible for Tieba and other businesses. The swaying and indecision on the search business and the nascent business are well known.
Since more than a decade ago, Robin Li has often faced the question of whether to invest limited resources in the first growth curve (cash cow business) or in the second growth curve business that will win in the future.
Obviously, from 2019 onwards, this option is more inclined towards the latter. At that time, it was the time when Xiaohongshu, WeChat, and Douyin began to emerge on search. It is impossible not to be aware of the change in the new situation in the search, since this choice is still made, it can only be explained that in the next game of "big chess".
It can even be said that the existing search pattern is due to the success of the new forces' active offensive, as well as their own will to choose another way and "save the country by curves."
As a result, when the Wenxin model was launched last year, it couldn't wait to announce that it would integrate search into Wenxin Yiyan, and the AI dialogue function was publicly tested in a small area, aiming to empower its core business through the most cutting-edge technology, that is, to feed back search by lighting up the new technology tree. Robin Li's words at the time - "Generative AI and search are a match made in heaven." "It also exposes the intention.
The development of AI technology makes the new search not a link, but through the understanding of the large model to generate the best answer, making the answer more efficient and easy to obtain, because the judgment of AI is no longer based on cold keyword recognition, and can better grasp the user's acceptance of search results, match preferences, provide information, and be more "short, flat and fast". It can be said that a new era of search has arrived.
On the other hand, whether it is Xiaohongshu or the byte behind Douyin, the layout on the large model has lagged far behind.
With the application of AI technology, it is now ahead of the curve in the new era of search. But in the future, one thing that is consistent with the past is how to strike a balance between commercialization and user experience, or even achieve the mutual promotion between commercialization and user experience, will be a pain point that needs to be solved with the naked eye.
Write at the end
The clouds are rolling and the battlefield of search has been spent more than twenty years in the spring and autumn.
As the protagonist of the long line, it has been controlling the main rhythm of the domestic search market in the past. But now, the king of 20 years seems to be gradually robbed of his shine by several rising stars.
Douyin and Xiaohongshu have relied on their capabilities to gain a foothold in the search field, which is considered a red ocean market. In today's era when search is no longer just search, it has both the business value of the old era through the key link in the demand decision-making chain, and the new era of technological innovation brings boundless imagination. It is clearly an attempt to balance the former with the latter, and in this case, every day can be a new day for the search battlefield.
Trapped in the environment on the horizontal competitive axis, and repeatedly vacillating on the vertical timeline, the Little Red Books briefly seized the opportunity and jumped to their feet.
But for now, the new cycle of the search market may have just ushered in the beginning. The search war will not stop.
The author of this article is Odd Even, i Dark Horse Authorization**. If you need to **please contact WeChat***ID: jioupai) for authorization, if it is not authorized, **must be investigated. ］