On December 11, 2007, NetEase.com, Inc., one of China's leading Internet services providers, announced the official operation of its new search engine -- www.yodao.com -- following two-and-a-half years of trial operation. NetEase researched and developed the new search engine independently, with its own independent domain name; the engine became the search core of the company's business on July 1. The company had previously been cooperating with the Internet giant, Google (www.google.cn).

"We believe that Internet search, such as the e-mail services launched by NetEase, has become an important base for network services," said Ding Lei, NetEase Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who established the technology-dependent business. Experiencing a series of changes in its e-mails, games and portals, the company seems to have found a new road leading to higher technology.

"The development of the new search engine gave us more confidence, because an ordinary small company would not able to reach such a high technology threshold," said Ding.

Yodao has now improved its search engine since last year. It has indexed more web pages, and updated its search engine with the newly launched news search, RSS reader and a new online dictionary version 1.0. NetEase statistics showed that the new Yodao search engine is 20 percent more accurate compared with the one in the trial period.

"The massive dictionary is only in its trial operation," said Senior Vice President of Search Operations Zhou Feng, who received a doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zhou is one of the core technology architects of Yodao.

Since the formal operation of the dictionary in September 2007, the number of downloads from official sites exceeded 100 million.

"But the businesses put into operation were only in the first phase and accounted for merely one third of the planned products," said Zhou.

The company planned to blend NetEase resources -- including individual communications, community channels and online games -- with Yodao search services. The move is expected to create new value for users, according to Zhou.

The success of Yodao will bring new vitality to the whole industrial link of NetEase, which, through Yodao, is expected to earn a large advertising income. Currently, the company's potential remains untapped.

"Frankly, we didn't think of developing search services in the beginning," said Ding, "but later, when we found that search engines need much technical improvement, we decided to do it. In addition, it does not cost users much when they change engine services. Moreover, our company is equipped with enough technical capacity and financial resources."

However, it was not as easy as previously imagined to scale this technological peak. NetEase, as one of China's top Internet companies, is almost the last competitor to challenge the search engine field. Challengers have so far been unable to shake the supremacy of Baidu and Google, the two giants in the search market.

Compared with the market in 2000, when search engines experienced reshuffling, the current market features a higher wall of technology set by Google, Baidu, and even Yahoo and Microsoft -- all of which are huge obstacles for latecomers.

Nevertheless, the search market is still full of opportunities, especially in terms of Chinese search, and will require more attention and patience. According to statistics from iResearch, a research institute in China, China has just surpassed the United States to become the largest search market in the world.

(Source: China Internet Weekly)