Editor's Introduction: In the future, what kind of evolution trend will the search engine market go towards? At present, content ecological search may become the trend of the times. So with the proposal of Web 3.0, will the search engine market usher in new variables? In this article, the author made an interpretation of the development of the search engine, let's look at it together.
Searching the market has been nothing new for a long time.
On February 8, 2022, market news said that Douyin Search and Apple Siri reached a cooperation, iPhone users can directly search for video content in Douyin through Siri voice commands. It is reported that this is the first time in the world that Siri has cooperated with the short video category App to cooperate with this feature.
The cooperation between the two parties, there is no need to delve into who borrowed whose light, it is certain that with the help of Apple Siri's mentality cultivated among users, Douyin video search has fallen again.
If this is at best a small act in the field of video search, but in connection with another thing, things become interesting.
Previously, in June 2020, near the college entrance examination, Apple and Baidu App launched a new function, Apple users only need to wake up Siri, voice input "college entrance examination real questions" "college entrance examination essay" and other related instructions, you can learn about the college entrance examination related information and services through Baidu App.
In the two cooperations, the Apple side sat firmly on the Diaoyutai and staged a "favoritism" drama.
To a lesser extent, in the Douyin video search and Baidu search, the former gets more resources tilted. But zoom in, in the competition between content ecological search and universal search, the balance of victory is tilting towards the former.
Based on the choice of Apple alone to deduce the above conclusions, the chain of argument seems to be a little thin, but more clue nodes have long pointed to this trend.
First, the general search is low tide
For a long time, there were two search engines in the market, which were general search and search vertical. The representatives of the first category are mainly Baidu, Google, etc., which are not too much to repeat here.
Vertical search is relatively niche, which is mainly aimed at a professional search engine in a certain industry, and is a subdivision and extension of the general search engine.
In general, unlike general search, the data of vertical search engines mostly comes from their own platforms, and when the amount of information on a certain platform reaches a sufficient amount, it is naturally formed, such as Taobao.
There is also often friction between the two search engines. To take a simple example, in 2008, Taobao blocked Baidu search engine crawlers, in essence, Baidu and Taobao are bidding ranking giants in the search model, and the two sides are at war to ensure the monopolistic nature of the advertising business.
At that time, many analysts believed that highly specialized vertical search vendors would pose a significant potential threat to the general search platform, but due to the uneven status of domestic vertical search engines and Baidu's advantages in traffic, general search was still the mainstream of the market for a period of time.
The change happened quietly in 2012.
"On the one hand, the monetization rate and conversion rate of search traffic are too low, on the other hand, in the era of mobile Internet, when most of the traffic comes from apps, Baidu will at most be one of the apps in the future." The value of search is collapsing at a speed you wouldn't have imagined. ”
On December 20, 2012, Ma Xiaofang, director of the Beijing Sankei bureau of CBN Daily, posted on Weibo that John Liu, then Google's global vice president of China, believed that the traditional Search was dead.
Search, as the mainstream way for users to obtain information, shouts the slogan of "search is dead", which is a bit sensational, but Google executives think that traditional search is dead, and things become serious.
Obviously, the birth of this trend is inseparable from the rise of mobile apps.
The reason is that in the era of mobile Internet, the sudden rise of super apps has taken away the work of the original search engine and gradually occupied the user's mind - the user already knows what to do on what kind of app, and then does not use the search engine.
Wired magazine made a similar point back in 2010, in its widely circulated article "The Web Is Dead, the Internet Lives Forever":
One of the biggest changes in the digital landscape over the past few years has been the transition from an open Internet to a semi-closed web platform. These platforms use the Internet for data transmission, but are not displayed through a browser. Their rise is largely driven by mobile computing models such as the iPhone. They're not bound by html language rules, and Google can't crawl their data.
After realizing this phenomenon, the general search engine wants to save the situation, taking Baidu as an example, hoping to counter this trend by building its own data - "light application", "direct number", "middle page" and "hundred numbers" are all products of this trend of thought.
Judging from the results, Baidu's strategy is not very successful, and on the evening of January 22, 2019, an article called "Search Engine Baidu Is Dead" suddenly swept the screen, which resonated with many users.
The article said, "Baidu as a search engine is dead. Baidu.com is no longer the place where you look for Chinese Internet content, but Baidu's own on-site search; it will lead you not to Chinese high-quality spiritual food in the Internet, but to the rotten and spoiled content that is hoarded in your own home. ”
The reason is that Baidu's self-built data behavior, in the minds of users, has become the platform's self-preferential treatment and a manifestation of unfair competition.
For the increasingly frustrated "Baidu", opportunities may be born under the interconnection.
On October 18, 2021, bloomberg reported that in order to break the "high wall garden" between Internet giants, Chinese regulators consider requiring online media companies such as Tencent and ByteDance to open up content to search engines such as Baidu.
Whether interconnection can become Baidu's miracle medicine is not known for the time being, but nowadays, the pace of content ecological search is almost unstoppable.
Second, the content ecological search is on the rise
No concept is born out of thin air, and neither is content ecology search. Similar to vertical search engines, the data of content ecological search comes mostly from the platform and its own ecology.
Referring to the "Content Ecological Search Trend Research Report" released by Aurora, short video platforms, social platforms, e-commerce platforms, news information platforms, and long video platforms are all content-based platforms.
They produce content according to their own rules, forming a unique content ecosystem, and the search based on this is the content ecological search.
According to this, today's headlines, vibrato, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, etc. are all content-based platforms, and even WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, etc., content is the basis for the survival of the platform, and the searches that occur on the platform are also content ecological searches.
Due to the origin with the search vertical, the search pioneers in the layout ecosystem are difficult to determine, but they can still find clues from several key nodes of the above players.
The video search mentioned above, for example, has become the standard for many Internet companies today.
First of all, on February 17, 2021, Douyin's first annual search short film was released, and ByteDance CEO Zhang Nan revealed that Douyin video search monthly active users exceeded 550 million, and the average daily video search volume has reached 400 million, and Douyin will increase investment in video search.
A few months later, Kuaishou also joined the battlefield. On September 27, 2021, Kuaishou released its first Kuaishou search brand, TVC, and announced that as of August, Kuaishou searched an average of more than 300 million times a day.
In essence, video search is still the scope of content ecological search, but the video of content production brings the video of search results.
Players that are harder to ignore are Alipay and WeChat, after on December 11, 2019, WeChat announced that WeChat search was officially upgraded to "WeChat Search".
The search results of WeChat search include public accounts, Mini Programs, games and other content, and the content comes from WeChat internal and platforms such as Zhihu and Douban. According to WeChat, users can search for more information and services by using the upgraded WeChat search.
Two years later, in the 2022 WeChat Open Class, Zhou Hao, a lecturer in the WeChat Open Class, introduced that the current search MAU has reached 700 million.
In terms of horizontal comparison, this value is already higher than the 607 million monthly active users of video search announced by Baidu App in September 2021, and the scale of more than 550 million monthly active users of video search announced by Douyin in early 2021.
In addition, in May 2020, Alipay also announced that it became an independent business unit for the first time after the re-integration of the search business, and Yuan Huaibin, the former product director of Taobao Search, was transferred to Alipay as the "number one" of Alipay's search business.
Although Alipay search rarely "shows its face" compared to WeChat search, its strength with a huge public domain traffic pool should not be underestimated.
Admittedly, most of the changes have occurred in "boiled frogs", and when frogs really feel threatened, they no longer have the ability to jump out of the iron pot.
According to Aurora research data, the advantages of independent search platforms still exist, ranking first with 71.5% usage; but search behavior has obviously migrated to other platforms, taking short video platforms as an example, 68.7% of users will search through them, becoming the second most used search platform.
In addition, 77.4% of all search behaviors of users will occur on content-based platforms; 90.5% of users will occur on social, short videos, long videos, e-commerce shopping, news and other platforms.
With the "Special Study on the Internet Search Industry: Full-dimensional Search Traffic Pattern and Commercialization Space" released by GF Securities, at this stage, although universal search has a certain first-mover advantage, the search behavior is now obviously migrating to the content ecological platform.
The data shows that the user penetration rates of instant messaging, video (including short videos) and online shopping are 97.3%, 93.4% and 80.3%, respectively, and the corresponding search usage rates are 62.0%, 46.7% and 59.0%, respectively.
What's more, this shift in user mentality has been transmitted to the level of advertising and marketing.
According to the "2022 Search Marketing Budget Trend Report" released by CTR CCTV Market Research, the survey data shows that 36.3% of advertisers are expected to increase their budgets in content ecological search advertising in 2022, and advertisers recognize content ecological search advertising as a new traffic/new form.
For search engines that use advertising as their main selling point, this trend can be described as very unoptimistic.
Web 3.0 may become a new variable
All of the above reflects that the development focus of search engines will shift from general search to ecological search.
Optimistically, for a general search engine, the difficulties are known. But now, uncontrollably, new variables emerge in this process.
In March 2021, Roblox, known as the "first stock of the meta-universe", was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the concept of "meta-universe" has since become a vane for technology companies, and a number of Internet technology giants have announced their entry into the meta-universe, and 2021 will become the first year of the meta-universe.
The metacosm as an emerging concept, with ten thousand people having ten thousand Hamlets, can be positioned in a way as a "more immersive digital experience."
At the same time, compared with the untouchable new concept of the metaverse, as the first ladder of the metaverse, web3.0, which can be traced step by step, is increasingly valued by the industry.
What is Web 3.0, this concept needs to be traced back to Web 1.0, Web 2.0.
Web 1.0 is a simple content acquisition and query, at that time, users mainly to receive information, this period, search engines and portals by monetizing advertising, become a phenomenon-level product.
Compared with Web 1.0, in the Web 2.0 era, the degree of user participation in the Internet has been greatly improved, which is generally manifested in user participation in the Internet and related content manufacturing, such as various short video platforms and communities.
As for Web 3.0, the concept has actually undergone several revisions, and today's Web 3.0 is Web 3.0 after the advent of blockchain technology.
That is, based on blockchain technology, in the Web 3.0 world, user data privacy will be fully protected by means such as encryption algorithms and distributed storage, and content and applications will be created and dominated by users (ideally).
If you say that the general search engine represented by Baidu is a typical product in the Web 1.0 mode, and content search such as WeChat Search and Douyin Video Search is a typical product under the Web 2.0 model.
So, in the Web 3.0 model, will this iteration intensify?
Previously, under the Web 2.0 model, with Internet giants as the core, multiple ecosystems were formed, and core Internet companies had monopolies on data, value and network effects, and there were strong barriers between the ecology.
Because data is siloed, a large number of market dividends are split away by platforms, rather than content producers or service providers. Taking the search engine as an example, in the centralized mode, among the users, platform parties and advertisers, the three are in a very unfair position, and the resources are biased towards the platform side of the search engine.
However, in the Web 3.0 model, the use of blockchain protocols, the user's data will have a high degree of confirmation.
Under this premise, existing search engine giants will no longer have our data. Will it face the fate of being subverted by Web 3.0?
The answer is unknown. But what is certain is that the future of the Internet is always full of thrilling adventures, and all the unknowable future will eventually come.
Resources
- Titanium Media "Say byebye with search, the future belongs to intelligent information"
- Connect to "The Web Is Dead, the Internet Lives Forever"
- Guosheng Securities Web3.0 Industry Report: Openness, Privacy, Co-construction
This article was originally published by @Technex on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol