www.Sogou.com is a Chinese search engine of Sohu.com, the second largest Chinese web portal.
Sogou’s China Search Market Share
Sogou.com is currently the third largest search engine in China that has search market share far behind those of Baidu’s and Google’s. The search market share of Baidu, Google and Sogou in quarter 3 of 2010, according to market research firm Analsys International:
- Baidu: 73%
- Google: 21.6%
- Sogou: 0.9%
Sogou.com’s Web Search
Sogou’s search engine spider/crawler, Sogou web spider, crawls websites in the world wide web and stores web pages in Sogou’s index with preferences and guidelines:
- Sogou web spider prefers unique web content.
- Sogou web spider can crawl web pages stored under several levels of sub-folders/directories, but prefers crawling web pages that are stored closely to the top-level folder/directory.
- Sogou web spider can handle URLs with parameters, but prefers short URLs with few parameters.
- Sogou web spider can follow URLs that use 301-redirect and/or 302-redirect, but may run into problems handling URLs that are configured to redirect multiple times. Review 301-/302-redirects in SEO glossary.
- Sogou web spider follows Robots.txt. Review Baidu Robots.txt for more information on Robots.txt.
Review Sogou.com’s web search help documents.
Submit Sites to Sogou.com
If you want your website to show up in Sogou’s organic web search results, submit your sites to Sogou through the site submission page.
- Submit only your site’s homepage URL.
- Submit your site only once.
Sogou does not guarantee your site being accepted into the organic search results pages at all. However, if your site’s content is acceptable according to Sogou’s content guidelines, it will show up in Sogou.com’s organic web search results pages within a week after submission.
Sogou Labs
Sogou Labs offers algorithms and experiments including:
- R-SpamRank: A spam detection algorithm that is based on link analysis by assigning spam values to web pages and semi-automatically selecting potential spam web pages. The algorithm first manually select a small set of spam pages as seeds. Initial R-SpamRank values are propagated through links and distributed among the whole web page set. Download the spam detection algorithm as *.pdf.
After sorting the pages according to their R-SpamRank values, the pages with high values are selected. Our experiments show that the algorithm is highly successful in identifying spam pages, which gains a precision of 99.1% in the top 10,000 web pages with the highest R-SpamRank values.
- An automatic search engine performance evaluation with click-through data analysis. The evaluation method generates navigational type query topics and answers automatically based on search users’ querying and clicking behavior. Download the evaluation as *.pdf.
Sogou’s Websites
Besides web search, Sogou offers Chinese Internet users:
- Map search: map.Sogou.com
- Image search: pic.Sogou.com
- Video search: v.Sogou.com
- News search: news.Sogou.com
- Music search: mp3.Sogou.com
- Blog search: blogsearch.Sogou.com
- Answers: wenda.Sogou.com
- Daohang: Sogou’s “Daohang” site (123.Sogou.com) is an Internet start page or Chinese world wide web’s yellow pages, similar to Baidu’s hao123.com, that offers lists of “URLs/links” of popular Chinese websites for Sogou’s users.
Sogou’s Free Tools
Sogou also made free tools available for users to download:
- Sogou Chinese input tool (pinyin.sogou.com)
- Soguo Internet browser (ie.sogou.com)