ByteDance, the owner of short-video app TikTok, has launched a new search engine in China, entering a sector currently dominated by Baidu Inc.
Beijing-based ByteDance is moving beyond its core businesses in news and video and into work-place messaging and music streaming, competing with Tencent Holdings and other Chinese tech firms.
The domain for the new search engine, Toutiao Search, sits within the company’s flagship product - Chinese news aggregator JinriToutiao.
ByteDance, which according to sources familiar with the matter was valued at $78 billion in its last financing round in 2018, declined to comment.
The company said on social media last month it was looking to hire people to work with its search engine team, and had hired technical experts from Google, Baidu and Bing.
It said the search engine would offer content from ByteDance-owned apps, including JinriToutiao and the Chinese version of TikTok, as well as the wider web.
Baidu has been the dominant search engine in China since 2010, when U.S. search engine giant Google retreated from the Chinese market after it declined to comply with a government request to filter its search results.
ByteDance, the owner of short-video app TikTok, has launched a new search engine in China, entering a sector currently dominated by Baidu Inc.
The domain for the new search engine, Toutiao Search, sits within the company’s flagship product - Chinese news aggregator JinriToutiao.
The company said on social media last month it was looking to hire people to work with its search engine team, and had hired technical experts from Google, Baidu and Bing.
