Sogou Search, a major player in Chinese language search engine industry based in Zhongguancun Science Park recently reached cooperation with Zhihu, a popular online community on knowledge sharing. Sogou will launch Zhihu Channel, which is its second specified content searching channel after the launch of the Wechat Channel.
Sogou will connect to all the data and content from Zhihu community. Users will be able to access to the questions and answers on Zhihu directly in the searching results by Sogou.
The Zhihu website has a total of seven million questions and around 23 million of answers. The content covers more than 100,000 topics including finance, law, design, movie, architecture, smart hardware, clean energy, and personal finance.
In addition, as Zhihu opens ports to Sogou, the search result page will not only show the questions and answers and the content of the topics, but also show the client’s page.
Furthermore, Sogou will launch specific search channel for Zhihu which includes hot topics, hot words, and famous columns on Zhihu. As a complementary part for searching business, the specific search channel promotes the information on Zhihu to users who are interested.
Sogou will provide technological output to Zhihu. To make it simple, Zhihu will use the personalized searching technology solution from Sogou to upgrade its base search engine and improve the searching function and services at PC and wireless terms. Targeting at the features of the question and answer community in Zhihu, Sogou provides personalized modification and settlement on searching services.
After using the technology from Sogou, the DCG evaluation score of Zhihu’s site searching function has been improved from 0.39 t 0.64.
Zhihu announced to complete C Round financing and receive around $55 million of investment a couple days ago. The new investors are Tencent and Sogou.
Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou said that Zhihu is the first company Sogou has reached strategic investment. Wang feels satisfactory of the investment and cooperation with Zhihu.
In the search business, Sogou is gradually forming its differential advantages, said Wang.
Both sides will maintain cooperative and open attitudes. The company may have technological transition cooperation with other corporations in the future, added Wang.
