Rebirth of the Wild Age

During Song Weiyang's participation in the Beverage Festival, big news broke out in the Chinese Internet community.

Sogou invested 15 million yuan, plus 30,000 Sogou stocks, in exchange for 95% of the shares of "hao123". While concluding the deal, Ding Ming followed Song Weiyang's advice and hired Li Xinping, the head of "hao123" with a high salary, as the deputy head of Sogou's "Internet Products Department".

Due to Ding Ming's help, the news caused a sensation, and Li Xinping was turned into a grassroots hero in the IT industry, inspiring countless newcomers to devote themselves to the Internet wave.

He is really a grassroots hero, thoroughly grassroots, because Li Xinping has only the first proof!

In his teenage years, this old man did nothing, a typical problem child. He is introverted, not talkative, and obsessed with the Internet. Instead of studying in high school, he became a webmaster. He spent the whole day chatting and playing games in Internet cafes. Until he was hired by Sogou, he hadn't even left the small county of his hometown.

But just such a bun with no education, no vision, and no pursuit. The navigation website he created in the Internet cafe actually sold for more than 10 million yuan, and he turned into Sogou's departmental vice president.

The media love to report this kind of news, and the general public also likes to listen to this kind of stories. Li Xinping's magical experience fully meets people's definition of a grassroots hero!

"Hao123" used to have no search bar, because when Li Xinping was a network administrator, he was a 100% rookie. He knew very well how rookies surf the Internet, and he believed that more than 60% of Chinese netizens were rookies— —Countless young people who walked into Internet cafes because of their curiosity, countless elementary school students who just bought a computer, and those middle-aged and elderly people who only use the mouse to operate. When they go online, they either can't remember the URL, or are too lazy to enter the URL, or don't know how to enter the URL, they don't know what a search engine is, or even the browser favorites.

In the eyes of these netizens, Baidu and Sogou are all shit, and navigation websites are the greatest!

Li Xinping put thousands of websites into "hao123" in different categories, and the rookies only need to click with the mouse. Moreover, as a webmaster, he knows the basic needs of netizens well. He has included all kinds of popular or unpopular URL links, including strange websites with colors.

In terms of traffic alone, in 2003, the Chinese navigation website "hao123" ranked first, "256", which was created this year, ranked second, and the most famous "37" only ranked third. Historically, "hao123" was acquired by Baidu, and it contributed 40% of Baidu's traffic in the second year (also due to Baidu's vigorous promotion).

Now Ding Ming is forced to fight back, Sogou has acquired "hao123" at a premium, and immediately has a search bar on its homepage, this search bar is specifically for Sogou to drain traffic.

After the news came out, Baidu tried to acquire "37" and was directly sent back by the cardinal because the cardinal felt that he had been insulted. Immediately, Baidu negotiated with "256" and obtained 80% of "256" at a price of 12 million yuan, making it clear that it would fight Sogou.

The contradiction between the two sides became fierce and open, and a search war broke out, which was also called the "dog fight war" by the media!

Baidu, which is super short of money, made concessions in the third round of financing and obtained an investment of 20 million U.S. dollars, of which Yahoo alone invested 10 million U.S. dollars. But at the same time that the equity concessions, Mr. Li Yanhong is very hard-spirited, using the "AB share" model to firmly control the company's decision-making power.

The cardinal was extremely angry and directly cancelled the "37" search bar on the homepage, and no search engine was used. It is as if Don Quixote held a high lance, aiming at the two windmills (Sogou hao123) and (Baidu 256).

And Sogou and Baidu both adopted an attitude of ignoring 37, each frantically promoting their navigation sites and blocking search results from other navigation sites. The cardinal could not tolerate this and stood up as the martial arts leader in the navigation industry, and joined more than 20 navigation websites to sue Sogou and Baidu for unfair competition. The lawsuit lasted more than a year, and the "Navigation Alliance" collapsed on its own before the verdict came out.

The red leader fell into a state of incompetence and rage. In addition to grief and anger, he ran to found 360 and fought happily with the "Jinshan Security Guard".

As for the competition between Sogou and Baidu, it is already in full swing——

Among the three major portals, Sohu and Netease both use Sogou search technology, and only Sina uses Baidu's search technology. However, two of the "three small portals" have cooperated with Baidu, especially the "FM365" jointly established by AOL and Lenovo, which is completely on Baidu's side, because AOL also invested in Baidu this time.

Other large and small websites are also forced to stand in line and must choose one of the two, otherwise they will be blocked from search results. This was too much trouble, and even alarmed the official departments. The heads of Sogou and Baidu were invited to drink tea, and then they lifted their blockades on the enemy's website groups.

In terms of technology, Baidu implemented the "Lightning Project" last year. After months of research and development, search speed, search accuracy, and page response speed are better than Sogou.

Sogou's technology originated from Google, and it was Google a few years ago. The follow-up technology must either be purchased or developed by itself. Since the previous main competitor was Yahoo Search, and Yahoo Search was very bad, Sogou's search technology research and development was not slow, and some achievements have been made, but that's it.

Now that search technology has been overtaken by Baidu, Ding Ming immediately mobilized elite soldiers and launched a research and development project called the "Wind Chasing Project".

These are actually nothing, the gap is not too big, and Sogou's content update rate is also better than Baidu.

The real operation of Baidu is that netizens only need to open the Baidu homepage and enter Chinese characters directly in the URL bar to search for the corresponding results.

This function seems useless, but in fact it is very useful. Let's use a joke to explain: Someone is playing a game in an Internet cafe and wants to find a game guide, but can't remember the URL, so he uses Sogou to search for the game name. He entered Chinese characters in the web address bar and found that he couldn't find it at all, so he was so angry that he switched to Baidu to search. This time it came out all at once. This netizen therefore concluded that Sogou is **** and Baidu is really awesome!

Nobody in Sogou, including Ding Ming, thought that someone would type Chinese characters in the URL bar, so that the large search bar in the center of the Sogou homepage would not be able to see it?

It turns out that there are many blind people, and there are more than one or two.

Sogou quickly added the Chinese character search function in the URL bar, and Li Xinping, who had just joined the company, was also transferred to the "Search Project Department" as a consultant. Because Li Xinping has been a network administrator for several years, he has seen all kinds of strange netizens, and he knows the basic situation of those Internet novices, and knows how to cater to the needs of novices.

In addition, Baidu took the lead in launching MP3 search and download services, and Sogou immediately followed up, which greatly increased China's MP3 sales. Baidu is also learning from Sogou and launched Baidu Baike. Anyway, both parties are copying each other to follow suit.

One night in the fall of 2003.

Li Mingyuan, a 20-year-old junior student at Communication University of China, is using his spare time to deal with the "a mess" BBS station work. Suddenly, he received a message from the station: "Hello, your BBS station is doing well~www.wuxiamtl.com~ Li Mingyuan replied easily: "Thank you for your encouragement, I will work harder. "

The other party said: "My name is Ding Ming and I come from Sogou."

"?????" Li Mingyuan hit a series of question marks.

The other party said: "Sogou is preparing to launch a product called'Tieba'. Chairman Song Weiyang visited your BBS site and called you to be the product manager."

Li Mingyuan was a little confused: "Are you really a liar?"

The other party replied: "Is it a liar? You will know when you come to Zhongguancun Sohu Building."

Of course Li Mingyuan has heard of Sohu Building, which is an office building shared by Sohu and Sogou. Is it true that Song Weiyang and Ding Ming have taken a fancy to him?

Li Mingyuan said very honestly: "President Ding, I am only 20 years old this year and I am still in my junior year. Are you sure you want me to be a product manager?"

At the other end of the network cable, Ding Ming was suddenly messed up in the wind and called Song Weiyang and said, "Lao Song, the person you asked me to dig is only 20 years old this year and is still in his junior year."

Song Weiyang smiled and said: "No matter how old he is, he managed a BBS station very well, and it is a variety of innovative excellence, which proves that he is a talent."

"Well, listen to you." Ding Ming was quite speechless.

How could Song Weiyang not know Li Mingyuan, who was the "Prince of Baidu", Baidu's youngest vice president, who was once regarded as the successor of Baidu by the outside world. It is a pity that the emperor has been alive and well, and the prince made some mistakes, and it is inevitable that he will be cleansed up.

Historically, Li Mingyuan will be recruited by Baidu to post it in a few months, and it is also because of the BBS station being fancy. Then he made Baidu Know, Baidu Baike and other products, less than a year after he graduated from university.

"Come to Sogou for an interview this weekend." Ding Ming sent another message. 8)