WeChat, the highly popular social platform in China, plans to make its search functions more powerful, announcing the creation of a new search-engine division.
WeChat is owned by tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., which has been a comparatively small player in search functions on the internet compared to China's No. 1 search engine Baidu. Tencent owns a 45% in Sogou, which is able to reach the massive amount of content published daily on WeChat, an edge that Baidu and other players don't have.
Millions of pages are published each day via subscription accounts on the platform - a deluge of information that is largely unreachable by Baidu searches. While Sogou's influence trails far behind Baidu, hosting only about 10% of total searches in China, it offers a way to access these articles.
Even after merging search functions with Sogou, Tencent did not completely give up on search. Around 2013, WeChat saw an explosion of content on the closed platform, and soon rolled out a search function within the app. By 2015, WeChat began allowing users to search for information on the broader internet, and now also supports searches of social media posts made by friends, akin to Facebook.
Consolidated operations at WeChat may indicate a ramp-up of search functions for the social networking and entertainment giant Tencent, which may eventually be introduced into Sogou, similar to its previous service, Soso. But others believe that the step is an incremental one that doesn't burden Tencent with vast expectations.
"Tencent may want to experiment with its own search within WeChat to diversify," said another Hong Kong-based analyst. "It's something Baidu has not been focusing on. They (Tencent) probably see it as a small business venture," he said.
WeChat, the highly popular social platform in China, plans to make its search functions more powerful, announcing the creation of a new search-engine division.
