No war in the search field? Of course not, a dark tide is surging forward.
On November 17, Baidu, the "boss" of the search market, released its third-quarter financial report, with Baidu's core business revenue of 24.7 billion yuan, of which online marketing revenue was 19.5 billion yuan, accounting for 70.8% of the total revenue, and the hosted page business increased by 43% year-on-year. That is to say, the revenue brought by search advertising is still the main revenue force of Baidu, and it is a stable growth point.
In the past decade, Ali's Shenma search, WeChat search, 360 search and headline search and other products have emerged, and it can be found that search has always been the direction that Internet companies have not given up, and the force intending to subvert Baidu has always existed.
The new forces that have emerged in the past six months are even more subversive. Ali set up a smart search business group, Tencent wholly-owned acquisition of Sogou, coupled with the cross-border entry of the short video platform, in October ByteDance will be the headline search into Douyin, Kuaishou mainly promote video search, so that the long-calm search track set off waves.
Tech Planet has exclusively learned that Douyin and Kuaishou have been testing independent search portals on apps and web versions. In the specific form, Douyin and Kuaishou display their respective searches on the mobile phone desktop in the mode of widgets, and users can access it through the search entrance on the mobile phone desktop.
The picture shows the Douyin search, Kuaishou search, Baidu search and headline search widgets
It can be found that "Douyin Search" and "Kuaishou Search" and "Baidu Search" are not much different in the form of small components on the mobile desktop, which also means that the two short video platforms of Douyin Kuaishou are accelerating by expanding the search entrance externally in order to obtain greater traffic conversion and align with Baidu search in the mode.
Nowadays, under the background of "interconnection", Baidu can directly search for products and content of websites such as JD.com and Douyin, and the drama of integration and competition is constantly staged. A search war around channels, technology, markets, marketing, products and other fields may be inevitable.
With the peak of the traffic of domestic Internet users, short video platforms have also been affected, and the two major domestic short video platforms of Douyin and Kuaishou have gradually emerged in terms of the number of users and the length of use. Compared with June last year, Douyin's monthly active users increased by only 20 million, while Kuaishou's average daily active users in the second quarter of 2021 fell by 2.1 million, and the average number of monthly active users fell by 13.6 million.
How to obtain new growth has become a problem facing "trembling".
Since last year, "Jitter" has made business changes, and has tried some new ways to obtain traffic, such as Douyin proposing social play, making Douyin social a way of life and entertainment for users, and Kuaishou is trying to support more creators and obtain new traffic through content. But this long-term and high-cost customer acquisition model is not the most efficient way for the Internet to play quickly.
As two products that are known for their content, the additional new services or functions are more of a traffic blessing for the platform, and the traffic entrance that is stable and effectively reached is still "search".
According to public data, in the first half of this year, "Jitter" has successively released the data of their respective searches. Zhang Nan, CEO of ByteDance, revealed that the monthly active users of Douyin video search have exceeded 550 million, and "in the next year, Douyin will increase its investment in search." Li Yan, head of Kuaishou search, revealed at the Kuaishou Photosynthetic Creators Conference that the monthly active users of Kuaishou Search have exceeded 250 million.
Needless to say, "search" has become a major direction of jitter.
"Jitter" search is different from Baidu search, mainly reflected in the expression of the results of the different from Baidu's graphic content, "Jitter" pays more attention to the search of video content, also known as "video search", through the video form to obtain search results, video presentation although more intuitive, more vivid and vivid.
The figure shows ByteDance's search product matrix
"Jitter" to do search is a necessary step, after years of rapid development, the platform has accumulated a large amount of content, from the search of these contents, Jitter also mastered a large amount of data, algorithm information, now to do search is to reuse and expand the original content.
Through search, Jitter can accurately provide a large number of videos to users, improving the user's efficiency. Secondly, search can also be connected with the business, for example, after the combination of e-commerce and search, the formation of "search e-commerce", users can directly jump to the interface with goods video through search keywords, providing a display entrance for merchants.
At present, Douyin is moving towards "search e-commerce". Previously, Douyin tested a function called "search a search", users can search for key sentences or words in the comment area, search results can display video content similar to the sentence, many e-commerce creators are also involved, by leaving a text similar to their own video content in the comment area of popular videos, you can let other users use the search function for the text, locate to their own video with goods, becoming a free import with goods.
In addition, Douyin is not limited to video content, and the search results also have headline encyclopedias, headline articles and other graphic content, completing its search display content to meet some users who like to watch graphic content.
The positioning of Kuaishou Search is more clear, emphasizing "answering every life with life". It can be simply understood that through the accurate results of video search, to solve the user's doubts in daily life, the positioning is more like a video version of the Little Red Book.
In addition, Jidak has also launched an off-site search widget in recent days, and it is not difficult to see that they hope to extend the search to the outside of the ecology and establish a new reach window externally, so as to more easily focus on content interaction and the traffic value brought by entertainment content.
While Jitter is adding code to video search, in recent times, BAT, an old player in the era of graphic search, has not been idle.
In the face of the aggressive situation of the new forces, Baidu Search took the lead in making adjustments and began to include video content of Douyin and Kuaishou.
For Baidu itself, Baidu's collection of video content from Douyin and Kuaishou is also a phased achievement of interconnection. Nowadays, Baidu has reduced the content it has crawled compared with before, and with the rise of new platforms such as Toutiao, creators are no longer limited to content distribution on Baidu, and Baidu will greatly enrich its own content by including these short video content.
Baidu may rely on video content to create a "video + graphics" information flow, further consolidating its own position as the head of off-site search. But for Baidu's good-looking videos, because of the crowding of "jitter fast", it will have a certain impact, how to balance its own business and third-party platforms, will be a major direction that Baidu search needs to solve next.
In terms of business monetization, Baidu Search has opened a new model, using intelligent mini programs to launch a big leap from "link information" to "link service". The search service will realize the linkage of online and offline business, which undoubtedly has broader commercial value.
After Ali first tasted defeat in the Shenma search business, it launched quark search, although quark search is not as good as Baidu search, but relies on its own minimalism, intelligence and other characteristics to win some users.
In the first half of this year, Alibaba established an intelligent information business group on the basis of the innovative business group, mainly focusing on intelligent innovation in the direction of information services. As its core product quark, it has become a key component of Ali's entry into the field of intelligent information, and this architectural adjustment has also been interpreted by the outside world as a comprehensive acceleration from tool products to service platforms.
At present, Quark Search has connected resources in different fields such as UC, Shuqi, and Medical Deer, seeking to enrich and improve the content ecology of the App itself, and accurately meet the needs of users in specific scenarios, and Quark Search has become a super user entrance to Alibaba Ecology. The data shows that in the past year, the number of active users of Quark App has increased by 5 times, and the search volume has increased by 6 times, and Quark has developed into a search service platform that cannot be underestimated.
With Tencent officially including Sogou under its command, Tencent has also integrated Sogou's search resources as desired, and now Sogou has become an important search entrance for Tencent's external channels, and has become a designated search tool for QQ browser and WeChat. In the 7 years from abandoning search to acquiring Sogou, Tencent understands that search is its indispensable shortcoming.
Of course, Tencent also has another search brand, WeChat" "Search". The latest data show that WeChat "search a search" monthly active users have reached 500 million, when compared to the 550 million monthly active users of Douyin search, there is still a gap, for the weChat search that is still developing at a high speed, Sogou has become an important display window outside the WeChat ecology, and how to deeply open up the two in the future still needs time to verify.
It can be seen that each company has not slowed down, but has gradually improved its own search business system to strengthen its competitiveness. The advantage of jitter fast development search is that the content display form is video, which is different from the mainstream graphic display, which can form differentiated competition, and the video has a more intuitive display of practicality, operation skills, and life content, which can mobilize users in the ecology to search and connect the businesses in the ecosystem through search.
However, there are also flaws in the search of Jitter, because it is inseparable from the platform, resulting in a limited audience range, on the contrary, other searches have begun to carry out a large-scale layout outside the ecology, which can grab the external traffic in real time, which will widen the distance between new and old players.
The emergence of the search widget, although it can open the traffic reach of the external search, but this is far from enough, and it is still not fully developed in the direction of using search to connect various services, and there is still a lot of distance from the goal of "search connecting everything", in a short period of time, the head search platform can not yet pose a direct challenge.
Nowadays, search seems to have a tendency to fight a second war, and the core reason is that search is a powerful tool to connect all products and content internally, and an infrastructure that connects information and services externally.
Information collection is not difficult to understand, that is, the use of crawler technology to crawl the information users want from major websites, the search entrance at this time, has become an important source of traffic.
Bidding advertising was the main revenue model of the first generation of search, how big is this market? According to the "Research Report on China's Mobile Search Industry in the First Half of 2020" released by Ai Media Consulting, the scale of mobile search users is expected to reach 754 million in 2020. Among them, the proportion of netizens obtaining information through mobile search reached 69.6%, and search engines became the primary entrance for netizens to obtain information, and quickly won the favor of advertisers. Relevant data show that in 2019, advertisers' willingness to invest in search engine marketing has reached 89.8%.
And now the second generation of search for Baidu, Douyin, and WeChat is actually a reproduction of Zhang Yiming's search obsession. Before starting his business, Zhang Yiming served as CTO of Kuxun, where Chen Hua (now CEO of Singing Bar) and Wu Shichun (founder of Meihua Venture Capital) jointly started a business. It's just the cold news of fate, and the Sogou, 360 search, etc. at that time did not beat Baidu.
The core reason is that Kuxun is a search for life, such as air ticket search, hotel search, train ticket search, job recruitment search and so on. But this project was born prematurely, and the technology and ecology of the entire industry are not perfect. In 2021, the improvement of many capabilities such as mini programs and video search technology has finally ushered in the second spring of search.
Among them, ByteDance's adjustment and determination are the most obvious, Zhang Yiming will be today's headlines, watermelon video, search, encyclopedia and domestic vertical service business into Douyin, the section is responsible for the overall development of domestic information and service business. It can be seen that Byte is integrating its own information business to create a large harvesting machine that integrates "traffic + cash".
Tech Planet has learned that many companies are both advertising agencies of ByteDance and Baidu, and although Byte's search business is small, it covers a particularly wide range of businesses, and has the ability to encroach on the target customers of search companies such as Baidu. A screenshot circulating in the industry also shows that the search volume of many keywords in Douyin has exceeded Baidu.
The market pattern or is changing, of course, in the search of this track, it is still a super and strong pattern, "one super" is Baidu, and how strong is Tencent Sogou, Douyin search and other rising stars. And Zhang Xiaolong in the 2019 WeChat Pro Open Class, more than once focused on the importance of WeChat search. With the addition of Jitter, bringing new video search gameplay, this pattern may change.
Whether it is the PC era or the mobile Internet era, or the current short video era, the search has changed from graphic search to video search, but what has not changed is its position as the first major traffic entrance and super monetization ability of the Internet.
With the addition of new players, the already fiercely competitive search track will become more and more crowded, but in the face of the huge commercial potential it brings and the temptation of traffic blessing, all parties are bound to increase investment and open a new search war.