ByteDance, owner of TikTok, launched a new search engine in China

ByteDance – a company based in Beijing – is expanding from core businesses such as news and videos to online messaging and music platforms, competing directly with Tencent and Chinese technology companies. Other country.

The company that owns TikTok has just released its own search engine in China

The domain name for the new search engine, Toutiao Search, is in the company’s flagship product.

ByteDance, which was valued at around $ 78 billion at the end of last year, declined to comment.

The company said on social media last month that it was looking to hire people to work on its search engine development team from Google, Baidu and Bing.

They said the search engine will provide content from ByteDance-owned applications, including Jinri Toutiao and TikTok Chinese versions, as well as expanding to web content.

According to Reuters test results, Toutiao Search provides censored results like other Chinese search engines.

Baidu has become the dominant search engine in China since 2010, when US search engine giant Google withdrew from this market (after they rejected the Chinese government’s request to filter Search Results).

Market researcher StatCorer said that Baidu accounted for 66% of desktop searches in 2018 and 71% searched on mobile devices in China.

Last May, Baidu announced the first time since the IPO in 2018, but it did not think that ByteDance’s search engine was a threat.

Ping Xiaoli, Baidu’s general manager of applications, said: “We have estimated that about two names emerge in the search engine market each year. But we have dominated the market for the past two decades. “.

Reference: CNBC