As Tencent, which has lost in the search field and was posted as having no search genes, why did it once again touch the field that it was not good at?
In the view of Leifeng Network, behind this is actually Tencent's yang plot at the right time, integrating time, location, and people.
The market is on the day.
It is no exaggeration to say that Tencent has waited for the best period of in-game search in two decades.
Tencent search original members told Leifeng Network that the era of traditional search engines has passed, the current open web page any enterprise can crawl, the future battlefield is content search, not web search, who has a lot of their own content, who is more likely to play a beautiful battle.
Like the game of online video, the UGC model is destined to be terminated by the PUGC model.
Search also moved from UGC to the PUGC era. Especially when the potential of those former top-stream self-owned content production platforms on the WAN is gradually weakening, and the main content positions begin to shift to an island-like ecosystem, the weaknesses of traditional search begin to be revealed.
Looking back at Tencent, its acquisition of Sogou's main body: platform and content business group (PCG) is the axis of Tencent's content ecology.
The business occupies a profitable area.
Tencent PCG covers long and short videos, online text, film, information flow, information and other content products, which are the fuel of Tencent's search. At the same time, PCG has QQ, QQ browser, and application treasure as a booster to achieve diversion and distribution, occupying the geographical advantage.
Well organized.
Although the search of the Wujun era has the geographical advantage of many user layers and traffic layers of Tencent, the actual implementation is not as smooth as expected.
Tencent's former executives told Leifeng that at that time, the search concept of Tencent's general office was not uniform, the implementation level of several teams did not deal with each other, strategic priorities and tactical play often swayed, and the search business did not get full support from other departments for a period of time. As a result, Tencent's "advantages on paper" in the search part have not been implemented, but have become disadvantages.
But it's also an organizational challenge that all large companies encounter in strategic innovation. If the paper advantage lacks first-class organizational guarantees, the interaction between funds and resources will eventually turn addition into subtraction.
At that time, Tencent in 2012 was undergoing the second major organizational change in history, changing from BU to BG system. Because search did not have a strong and stable organizational guarantee, whether it was Li Haixiang, senior executive vice president in charge of search at the time, or Xiong Minghua, CTO, the power was constantly diluted, and search was split up in the gap between the loss of the right to speak of top executives, and was scattered in the mobile Internet business group (MIG) and the technology and engineering business group TEG.
Ten years later, Tencent, the new head of search, Xi Xiaohu, is one of Tencent's reused airborne executives in recent years, directly and indirectly managing nearly 4,000 people, reporting to COO Ren Yuxin.
Tencent's role in the future of Sogou search is relatively low-key, saying only that it will "support the development of other businesses on the platform and provide users with services such as information search".
But last week, Sogou Search App announced that due to the company's business adjustment, Sogou Search App will be fully upgraded to Bingo App in mid-to-late January 2022, and clearly stated that it will continue to provide search services, focusing on young users.
The rising search market has ushered in the biggest variable, however, beyond this variable, there are larger variables. Tencent PCG may be brewing through search, brewing the organization of the vertical and horizontal.
Regrets of the past: Tencent's management's search philosophy conflicts
Why did Tencent's search fail that year?
In the past decade, countless people have been analyzing, from the market, products, technologies, top leaders, and the metaphysics of the widely circulated "corporate gene".
First of all, from the essence of the product, Tencent Sogou and Sogou can be understood as "the third generation of interactive search".
Nowadays, although the connotation and extension of search have been greatly expanded, the basic principle is still the third generation of search, so the entire Internet industry is recognized that there is no "fourth generation search" that is currently brewing for intergenerational replacement in basic theory.
In 2005, Baidu successfully went public and became the largest overseas company in wall Street history, which made the domestic Internet crowd wake up and join the search market.
For obvious purposes, Tencent launched its own search engine "soso" in 2006, but after several years of operation, the market performance of soso was not satisfactory, and it did not pose a real threat to Baidu.
When it comes to Tencent's search business, we have to mention Wu Jun. Wu Jun and Wang Xiaochuan are Tsinghua alumni, but when Wang Xiaochuan entered Tsinghua in 1996, Wu Jun had been a lecturer at Tsinghua for three years, and then went to the United States to study for a doctorate, and then joined Google in 2002.
2010 is the year of super variables on the Chinese Internet, the year of the peak of the PC Internet, and the turning point of the transition from the PC Internet to the mobile Internet. For the Chinese search industry, it is also the year when Google left the Chinese market and Baidu's market share and market capitalization reached their peak.
In the face of Google's huge share in China, Tencent believes that it is an important strategic opportunity period, so it recruited Wu Jun from the United States as vice president of the search business, but Wu Jun did not make the search better. Later, some insiders analyzed that part of the reason was related to Wu Jun's lack of Olympic aid within Tencent and his inability to win the support of other senior management and business layers.
After Wu Jun himself left Tencent in 2012, he was still difficult to let go of this, and he took the opportunity to accept media interviews to send a long letter with three core contents:
1. When I first joined Tencent, I made it clear to several people in charge of Tencent that if I were to do the search again, it would actually be a waste of time for me, and no one would want to do the same thing twice. In fact, my advice to Tencent is not to do a search.
2. But Tencent (management) insisted that I take charge of the search. Therefore, we agreed to "build a search engine that is comparable to or even better than Google in two to three years."
3. My search traffic has increased many times during tencent's tenure, but the key is that "so far, non-search companies have not succeeded in doing searches, and there are genetic problems."
The article was later widely circulated online under the title "Wu Jun's Reflections on Tencent's Search Strategy: Difficult for Non-Search Companies to Succeed," and the core idea was that "latecomers, even if they do better than the former, may not be successful." Not to mention not doing well. If the latecomers in the market want to succeed, they must have an essential improvement over the previous companies and bring new value to users."
No matter how to evaluate Wu Jun's success or failure at Tencent, his views are actually the most important for the search market.
The basic criteria for searching are "fast, accurate, complete, new", but the latecomers must pay higher costs but lower benefits if they want to be more complete than the predecessors.
Because the earlier the search timeline, the lower the probability of being retrieved, but the user will change the search engine as long as it is not retrieved once, so in order to achieve the equivalent of only "full" for the predecessor, it is necessary to invest in a very uneconomical economic model, and it turns out that even if it is as rich as Microsoft Bing, there is no determination to support this investment.
Former Google CEO Schmidt also has a similar view, the reason why Google search has an advantage in the competition, not that Google technology and products are ahead of schedule, more importantly, the reason is low operating costs, and its causal relationship chain is to rely on low operating costs to promote high-tech services.
"Google's operating costs are only a fraction of microsoft and Yahoo's, and the cost of a search service is only a few tenths of a cent. And the money saved, Google can increase the difficulty of computing by increasing the number of servers. With the same unit price as its competitors, Google can apply more hardware and algorithms to achieve better search quality. Google's competitors can't provide such a high-quality service anyway. If they provide such a service to users, the high cost will make them lose money seriously. ”
After Wu Jun came to Tencent, the search path also advanced towards Schmidt's Google methodology: holding high, buying a large number of servers, and cooperating with efficient algorithms to reduce the cost of a single search and carry out technical dimensionality reduction attacks on similar enterprises.
However, Wu Jun's path has not won the recognition of some Tencent executives and business backbones, believing that Tencent, as a latecomer, should rely more on channels and let the browser go first, rather than colliding with Baidu and competing with search efficiency.
Sogou management has told Tencent executives that the number of Sogou servers is only one-third of Sogou's. The impact of this number on Tencent's internal is huge, and it is believed that it is difficult for big manufacturers to do new business with the attitude of a rich second generation.
The divergence of Tencent's path to do search has directly led to the strategic swing of search and search. Latecomers are uncertain and will surely enter a dead end.
Which path is right? In the context of the times a decade ago, it was all true.
Facts have proved that the QQ browser that has raised its strategic priority has always ranked among the top three in the domestic market, and has promoted many other innovative products. Google's business model of "low operating costs to promote high-tech services" has successfully suppressed the rise of Microsoft Bing, and there have been no latecomers like Google subverting Yahoo in the global search market.
It's just that Tencent's resources were limited at that time, and its strategic focus was shifting, and it could not support the simultaneous implementation of the two paths.
Wu Jun's two years in Tencent, 2010-2012, coincided with Tencent's most difficult and most swinging darkest moment: deep in the quagmire of the 3Q war and public opinion condemnation represented by "Dog ** Tencent". In addition, the tide of mobile Internet has made Tencent rethink the boundaries, diagnose itself, and invite people from all walks of life to discuss what can and cannot be done.
In 2012, Tencent underwent the second major organizational change in the company's history, seven years after the first.
In those two years, it was laid that Tencent was a position on the role of the Internet", rather than an army that haunted major battlefields. Give your ecological partners the flow weapon and help them fight in their respective fields.
Tencent's biggest weapon, WeChat, was born at that stage.
It's just that JD.com and later Meituan and Pinduoduo have fought a beautiful battle with Tencent's open traffic.
Although Sogou's performance is remarkable, on the one hand, it does not restrict Baidu, and more importantly, on the other hand, another company with search and recommendation engine genes has grown in the market, which is threatening Tencent: ByteDance.
This is also one of the reasons why Tencent, as a "arsenal of weapons", has personally come to the front line to do a search after ten years.
Back to the search itself, search seems to be a pure online light business, but the background needs heavy costs, an illustration of this argument is that the resources are far inferior to Tencent's Sohu, let alone support Wang Xiaochuan's Sogou development.
Therefore, with the very wonderful bridge section in the "Boiling New Decade", that is, "Wang Xiaochuan saved the dog's life twice", the fact is that Wang Xiaochuan, in order to prevent Zhang Chaoyang from selling Sogou to Zhou Hongyi's 360 search, has persuaded Ali and Tencent to invest in Sogou. Although the former is not harmonious, it actually integrates a lot of Yahoo Search's resources; while the latter chose Tencent to buy a stake of $448 million in Sogou in 2013, obtaining a 36.5% stake in the latter, and merging its soso and input methods into Sogou as a result, Wang Xiaochuan can be called a great achievement, while Ma Huateng and Martin Lau are said to have made a decision in just one phone call.
However, even if Sogou plus Tencent, including a part of the resources of Yahoo previously inherited, the combination of Tencent + Sogou (dominated by Sogou) did not really shake Baidu, and Wang Xiaochuan finally regretted retirement, and Sogou was included in Tencent's arms.
However, although Baidu's market share in search exceeds 60%, due to the information islanding brought about by the mobile Internet, a large number of high-quality content has begun to be deposited in the ecology of each app boundary and separated from each other, and the information value and economic value of traditional web search are irreversibly declining. Baidu is finding a way by adding intelligent dimensions, and new generations such as Byte are also eager to try within their own ecological walls, but overall, the new generation of search has not yet arrived.
Tencent Search Rebirth: PCG's Vertical and Horizontal
Tencent Search ten years ago stopped at the second organizational change, while ten years later, the new Tencent Search grew in the context of Tencent's third organizational change "930".
The famous 930 reform in Tencent's history refers to Tencent's adjustment of the previous 7 major business groups to 6, except for WeChat (WeChat business group WXG) and games (interactive entertainment business group IEG), all other ToC services - QQ, information flow, long and short videos, animation pictures, news information, browsers, application treasures, etc. have been stripped from the original 4 business groups and integrated to form PCG.
It is no exaggeration to say that PCG is the most complex but also the most diverse ecosystem in the entire Tencent line.
Ren Yuxin once said that PCG is the core promoter of Tencent's cultural strategy and shoulders the heavy responsibility of exploring the future development of digital content.
Content is the key word in this sentence, specifically, it is a digital, technological culture and content production center, all concentrated in PCG, which also makes its management have a certain cultural dimension and technical dimension of the dual attributes, thus highlighting the complexity.
The coordinated operation of PCG's major product lines has become the management problem that Ren Yuxin most urgently needs to solve.
The most ideal form is the front-end aggregation and the bottom layer is opened.
Front-end aggregation is to abstract the commonalities between all products and derive an application that can aggregate most businesses.
Tencent's point of view can be seen as an attempt to crack, this application that tries to integrate information and video, is regarded as Tencent's version of "today's headlines", but it does not fully open the situation.
At the bottom, according to media reports, Ren Yuxin regards the technology system as the key to pcG's ability to establish a system, he said: "Investing energy in the early stage to establish a good technical system, after seeing new opportunities, select ready-made technical components to quickly achieve prototypes and rapid verification, and find out how much opportunity there is in this track or sub-track, which is the most important purpose."
In a sense, componentization, rapid verification, and flexible invocation are all in line with the idea of "big middle office" of modern enterprises, that is, abstracting relevant capabilities to form tools or services, precipitated on the middle stage, and can be flexibly called.
According to Tiger Sniffpro's report, PCG has implemented a set of Tech Lead mechanisms within the pcg, which establishes a separate technical reporting line in addition to the business reporting line. This means that all technicians have to undergo a two-way assessment, in addition to the business to hand over the results, the evaluation also added technical action requirements. At the same time, each business line also set up a similar role as a CTO, in addition to the head of the business, but also reported to Zeng Yu, vice president of technology.
And closely cooperating with Zeng Yu was Xiao Hu. Leifeng Network has also previously reported that the two are also responsible for the technical team of more than 5,000 people in PCG, and Xi is also in charge of the information platform and service line (referred to as the service line) covering nearly 2,500 people in search.
If Zeng Yu, who followed Ren Yuxin from IEG to PCG, has a mission to build a PCG middle office and do a good job in the collection of content production tools.
Now Ren Yuxin hopes that Xi Xiaohu, a world-renowned top search expert, will start from the middle of the platform after a year of partnering with Zeng Yu to gather, index and provide various content services through search to open up PCG front-end applications.
It is understood that Ren Yuxin said at an internal PCG communication meeting that the future development should not be driven by competition, but by users.
Tiger is currently the vice president of Tencent, graduated from Princeton University in the United States, worked at Google for twelve years, twice won the honor of Google's highest award- the Founder Award, and has served as the core designer of the advertising system, the global technical director, the vice president of Google China Research Institute, the CTO of Xiaohongshu, and the vice president of Didi Chuxing.
Why the industry's response to Tencent's search again is flat, to some extent, it is not enough to understand Tencent's organizational guarantee for entering the search.
In terms of hard resources, Ren Yuxin gave Xi Xiaohu the real power to directly or indirectly manage Tencent's nearly 4,000 employees.
When Wu Jun joined Tencent in 2010, tencent and Baidu each had more than 10,000 employees.
This means that it has gathered, at least from the book, the potential resources available to it exceed the sogou period, the Sogou period, the Sogou + Ali period, and the Sogou + Tencent (Sogou-led) period.
Mr. Xi's latest report, Tencent COO Ren Yuxin, is the only general member of Tencent to manage two business groups: the Platform and Content Business Group (PCG) and the Interactive Entertainment Business Group (IEG).
However, as mentioned above, due to the extreme complexity of the entire business composition of PCG, after Sogou was merged into Tencent, PCG became tencent's first business group with more than 20,000 employees, which is five times that of the WeChat business group. On top of the huge staff base, there are 7 vice presidents of the company.
Its business sources (self-built or acquisitions), its composition form and user groups are the most complex in tencent's system, and its governance difficulty and integration difficulty are also the existence of sss levels in tencent's system, which is not enough to have veterans like Ren Yuxin.
Why Leifeng Network believes that search for Ren Yuxin, Zeng Yu, Xi Xiaohu and even the entire PCG + IEG, has immeasurable significance, it is precisely because the structure of this plate is complex, the system is complex, its complexity and multi-directionality of the business, making it difficult to integrate in any way, and search to some extent, can be the mirror of all these services, index and even the middle platform, is an important diversion and diversion hub that allows all users to more easily reach the above many services and use many services. is a tool that can provide some degree of virtual integration of the above businesses.
It is not only meaningful for external users, but also for Tencent's internal users to use its resources, and it is also meaningful for the resources in the digital and visual management section of Ren Yuxin and Xiaohu.
Many years ago, when many Chinese companies were still using Oracle and SAP products, they were often troubled by a poor search experience, because they could not find the valuable digital wealth deposited by enterprises, and at that time, some people proposed the idea of doing "enterprise information search", which was actually an index and restructuring of internal resources of enterprises, but because many enterprises are very sensitive to open internal data, so this business has not grown.
But this actually provided a good idea, that is, the structure and flexible callability of internal resources, which later became the mainstream of the cloud service era.
Therefore, we are more willing to regard PCG's search attempt not as a small support for the remaining songs of Sogou, but more willing to see it as a breakthrough, a tencent person who believes in the power of technology from Ren Yuxin to Zeng Yu to Xi Xiaohu, three Tencent people who believe in the power of technology, and do the most cultural thing in the most technical way - to build a cultural centripetal mechanism guaranteed by a technical system.
The Bigger Variable: The Internet "Tears Down the Wall"
Readers may ask, why not compare with Baidu?
In a sense, it is difficult to compare, and it is difficult to produce such a comparison.
Because, Wu Jun's point of view has been made very clear, in the field of web search, Tencent is difficult and unnecessary to copy the road that Baidu has traveled, so the development path of Tencent's new search product "Bingo" in the future will not be to fight with Baidu in this field.
From another point of view, if Bingo focuses on the search or indexing inside the ecology of PCG+IEG, then its ecological barrier itself will keep Baidu out of the wall, which will be a one-man show without opponents.
However, Leifeng believes that if it is limited to this, then Bingo is just a subset of the business within tencent system with a good experience and good revenue, which is very safe within its own barriers, but although its search spans some web searches, entertainment, videos, online texts, and games, it is ultimately a limited system, its number of users is basically equal to the sum of PCG+ IEG users, its incremental space is limited, and it is even difficult to enter the content ecological barriers of the same brother WeChat. The latter's content charm and creative ecology are the biggest treasures in the entire mobile Internet era.
The reason why there is a bigger variable is that the ongoing Internet "wall-breaking" movement has become the larger and more magnificent background of this era.
In fact, the search experience of Chinese Internet users, and even the world's Internet users, has not taken a qualitative leap for many years. It doesn't really depend on Google or Baidu, and while the search capabilities of these two companies that evolved into artificial intelligence have spread to speech, images, and natural language understanding, they can't leapfrog the "graben" created by different companies in the era of mobile Internet in the form of apps.
The natural graben of the mobile Internet is actually not caused by the form of APP, this form is only the appearance, and its essence is the private domain traffic pool formed by each company through self-built ecology, which is naturally exclusive.
Therefore, so far, no head company dares to underestimate the value of search, Tencent is, in fact, Has already started ByteDance, and any company with a self-built ecology, in fact, are silently doing search. It's just that before it was limited by the limitations of the industry, no company could take its own ecology.
However, if China's Internet industry can really break down the barriers between major platforms to some extent, netizens will experience for the first time a super beautiful experience of "search freedom, reach freedom" from a starting point, free and arbitrary access to web pages, social networks, public accounts, short videos, long videos, shopping sharing communities and everything else, although this goal seems to be a little farther away.
But if this day comes, then the Chinese Internet will set off a more fierce search war than more than a decade ago, and the position of the winner will definitely enter the first group of the Chinese Internet.