Rebirth of the Wild Age

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

Sogou company spent 15 million yuan, plus 30,000 Sogou shares, in exchange for % shares. At the same time as the deal was concluded, Ding Ming followed Song Weiyang's suggestion and hired Li Xinping, the head of hao123 with a high salary, as Sogou's Internet Product Department Deputy Minister.

Thanks to Ding Ming's promotion, the news became a sensation, and Li Xinping was made into a grassroots hero in the IT world, inspiring countless newcomers to devote themselves to the tide of the Internet.

He is really a grassroots hero, a grassroots through and through, because Li Xinping only has a junior high school diploma!

This old man accomplished nothing in his youth, a typical problem child. Introverted, not talkative, obsessed with the Internet, instead of studying in high school, he became a network administrator, spending all day chatting and playing games in Internet cafes, until he was hired by Sogou, he never even left the small county town of his hometown.

But it is such a country bumpkin with no education, no vision, and no pursuit. The navigation website he created in an Internet cafe was sold at a high price of more than 10 million yuan, and he even turned into the vice president of the department of Sogou.

The media loves to report this kind of news, and the general public also likes to hear this kind of story. Li Xinping's miraculous experience fully fits people's definition of a grassroots hero!

hao123 used to have no search bar, because Li Xinping was a 100% rookie when he first became a network administrator. He knows very well how rookies use the Internet, and he believes that more than 60% of Chinese netizens are rookies. Young people who walked into Internet cafes out of curiosity, countless primary school students who just bought computers, and middle-aged and elderly people who can only operate with a mouse. When they surf the Internet, they either can’t remember the URL, or are too lazy to input the URL, or they don’t know how to input the URL, they don’t know what a search engine is, and they don’t even know how to use the browser favorites.

In the eyes of these netizens, Baidu and Sogou are all bullshit, and the navigation website is the greatest!

Li Xinping put thousands of websites into hao123 by category, and novices only need to click with the mouse. Moreover, as a network administrator, he is well aware of the basic needs of netizens, and he has collected all kinds of popular or unpopular website links, including those strange websites with colors.

In terms of traffic alone, in 2003 China's navigation website, hao123 ranked first, 256, which was founded only this year, ranked second, and the most famous 3721 only ranked third. Historically, hao123 was acquired by Baidu, and contributed 40% of Baidu's traffic in the second year (there is also a reason for Baidu's vigorous promotion).

Now Ding Ming was forced to fight back. Sogou bought hao123 at a premium, and immediately added a search bar on its homepage. This search bar was specially designed to attract traffic for Sogou.

After the news came out, Baidu tried to acquire 3721, but was directly rejected by the leader in red, because the leader in red felt that he had been insulted. Immediately afterwards, Baidu negotiated with 256 and obtained % shares at a price of 12 million yuan, making it clear that it wanted to compete with Sogou.

The conflict between the two sides became fierce and public, and a Chinese search battle broke out, which was also called dog war by the media!

Baidu, which is super short of money, made concessions in the third round of financing and received an investment of 20 million US dollars, of which Yahoo alone invested 10 million US dollars. But at the same time as the equity concession, Mr. Li Yanhong was very tough, using the ab stock model to firmly control the company's decision-making power.

The leader in red was extremely angry, and directly canceled the search bar on the homepage of 3721, and no search engine was used. It's like Don Quixote holding up his lance, aiming at (Sogou+hao123) and (Baidu+256) two windmills to charge to the death.

Both Sogou and Baidu ignored 3721, promoted their navigation websites wildly, and blocked the search results of other navigation stations. The leader in red couldn't bear it, so he stood up as the leader of the martial arts in the navigation industry, united more than 20 navigation websites, and sued Sogou and Baidu for unfair competition. The lawsuit lasted for more than a year, and the Navigation Alliance collapsed internally before the verdict came out.

The leader in red fell into a state of incompetence and rage. In addition to grief and anger, he ran to establish 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 cooperate with Baidu, especially fm365, a joint venture between AOL and Lenovo, 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 the search results. This made a fuss too much, and even alarmed the official departments. The heads of Sogou and Baidu were invited to drink tea, and then each unblocked the enemy website group.

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

Sogou's technology comes from Google, and it was Google several years ago. Subsequent technologies must be bought with money or developed by themselves. Since the previous main competitor was Yahoo search, and Yahoo search sucks, Sogou's search technology research and development is not slow, and some achievements have been made, but that's all.

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

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

Baidu's real show operation is that netizens only need to open Baidu's homepage, directly enter Chinese characters in the URL bar, and they can also search for corresponding results.

This function may seem useless, but it is actually very useful. Let’s use a joke to explain: Someone is playing a game in an Internet cafe and wants to find a game strategy, but he can’t remember the URL, so he uses Sogou to search for the game name. He entered Chinese characters in the URL bar, but found that he couldn't find them at all, so he was so angry that he switched to Baidu to search, and this time it came out all at once. Therefore, this netizen concluded that Sogou is rubbish, and Baidu is awesome!

Including Ding Ming, no one in Sogou thought that someone would enter Chinese characters in the URL bar, and the search bar in the center of the Sogou homepage would be invisible?

Facts have proved that there are many blind people, and there are more than one or two.

Sogou quickly added a Chinese character search function in the URL bar, and Li Xinping, who had just joined the job, 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 wonderful netizens, he knows the basic situation of those Internet novices, and he knows how to cater to their needs.

In addition, Baidu took the lead in launching the mp3 search and download service, and Sogou immediately followed up, which greatly increased the sales of mp3 in China. And Baidu is also learning from Sogou and launched Baidu Encyclopedia. Anyway, both parties are copying each other and following suit.

One night in the fall of 2003.

Li Mingyuan, a 20-year-old junior at the Communication University of China, is using his spare time to deal with the messy bbs station work. Suddenly, he received a message on the site: Hello, your bbs site is doing well.

Li Mingyuan replied smoothly: Thank you for your encouragement, I will work harder.

The other party said: My name is Ding Ming, from Sogou.

??????? Li Mingyuan asked a series of question marks.

The other party said: Sogou is going to launch a product called 'Tieba'. Mr. Song Weiyang, the chairman, visited your bbs site and called you to be the product manager.

Li Mingyuan was a little confused: Are you really not a liar?

The other party replied: Whether you are a liar or not, you will know when you come to Sohu Building in Zhongguancun.

Of course Li Mingyuan had heard of Sohu Building, which was an office building shared by Sohu and Sogou. Could it be that he was really taken by Song Weiyang and Ding Ming?

Li Mingyuan said very honestly: Mr. Ding, I'm only 20 years old this year, and I'm 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 suddenly became flustered, called Song Weiyang and said, Old Song, the person you asked me to dig is only 20 years old this year, and he is still in his third year of college.

Song Weiyang said with a smile: It doesn't matter how old he is, he manages a bbs station very well, and he is outstanding in various innovations, which proves that he is a talent.

Okay, I'll listen to you. Ding Ming was quite speechless.

How could Song Weiyang not know about Li Mingyuan? He was the Baidu prince, the youngest vice president of Baidu, who was once regarded as Baidu's successor by the outside world. It's a pity that the emperor has been living well, and the prince has made some mistakes, so he will inevitably be wiped out.

Historically, in a few months, Li Mingyuan would be recruited by Baidu to make a post bar, and it was also because of the bbs station that he was favored. Then he made products such as Baidu Zhizhi and Baidu Encyclopedia. It was less than a year before he graduated from university.

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