[photopress:IT_yodao0.jpg,full,alignright]Netease has a new homepage to allow for the fact that the search engine Yodao has become the official search engine of the site.
Yodao, run by 163.com, is now out of beta — the test phase which can last many months, or in the case of Google, years — and now integrates many services from Netease, the biggest online game company in China, while, at the same time, still continuing to search like Google.
The company’s CEO Ding Lei says he expect the new website would become the No. 1 search engine within three years.
It took two and a half years for over 100 technicians to create the search engine. Ding Lei is positive that quality will tell. ‘If we provide better services, we will have many customers. They never refuse better products.’
China’s search engine market has not fully developed. Only 10% of Chinese enterprises have their own websites.
Already Wang Zhansheng, CFO of Baidu.com, has commented that the future market is able to support more new search engine companies. The reviews suggest that the Yodao Reader, while not better than the Google Reader, is fast, stable and Ajax-powered.
Yodao News Search is also new. Like Google News and Baidu News, it generates headlines on the subject searched for automatically.
All of which may bring some changes to the Chinese search market where Baidu is in a massive lead with Google – this is an unusual experience of that continuously booming company — trailing along in the rear. If Google is now beaten by Yodao then Google will be sending messages to its subsidiary in China that it is not happy, not happy at all.
Source: China Web 2.0