Shake Up In Chinese Search Market As Engines Merge

In a move somewhat reminiscent of the back end merger of Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engines, the number three and four search sites in China are set to combine assets and cross-promote in a nearly $450 million deal writes ZDNet.

The deal involves Chinese online portal Tencent’s Soso search engine and Sohu’s Sogou. The latter is number three and while Soso is number four in the Chinese search market. Google is number five.

Qihoo 360 technology company’s search engine (So.com) has moved into second place after Baidu. Amazingly the Qihoo search engine only launched in Q3 of last year. The relative rankings of China’s search engines are as follows:

• Baidu: 69 percent
• Qihoo: 15 percent
• Sogou: 8.9 percent
• Soso: 3.5 percent
• Google: 2.1 percent

The Wall Street Journal says that Tencent is buying 36.5 percent of Sogou

Last August Qihoo was the rumored suitor for the stake in Sogou. The Tencent investment is thus regarded as partly defensive to keep Sogou out of Qihoo’s hands.

It’s not entirely clear from what I’ve seen whether Tencent’s Soso will entirely disappear or remain. Here’s what ZDNet says: