Product Search Engines a New Battleground in China, as Netease Ups Its Armory

The Chinese internet company Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) will launch its own separate product search engine next year, according to the company’s VP, Jin Lei.

At present, Netease has a general web search engine – Youdao.com, which has less than one percent of market share – which already has a shopping search function (pictured above). But clearly Netease deems China’s B2C e-commerce market to be massive enough to warrant a stronger strategic push into making a product search engine. But Mr. Jin did not specify how the new venture will improve on what his company is doing already, aside from the separate URL.

But he did reveal how Youdao’s shopping search function is performing so far, claiming that it has generated 50 million transactions per month on the B2C sites that it indexes, and that 11 million users find it an important online shopping tool.

Assailing Etao

The move will pit Netease even more directly against Alibaba, which has its own Etao.com product search engine. Etao has drawn some indignation in the industry this year, with a few e-commerce rivals to Alibaba attempting to weaken its search prowess by blocking Etao’s ‘web spiders’ from indexing its online stores. Despite Alibaba’s insistence that Etao is an impartial search engine that won’t favour the company’s own B2C site, Netease will find it easier to paint itself as a fair and balanced alternative.

Last time we checked in on Netease’s Youdao site, it had a mere 0.31 percent of the search engine market in China, pushed down into fifth place by slightly stronger efforts from Tencent (HKG:0700) and Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU).

[Source: TechWeb – article in Chinese]