Youku’s Video Search Engine is Blocked by Several Rivals

In a sign of growing hostility amongst video-streaming services in China, three such sites have reportedly blocked access to a video search engine owned by the market leader, Youku (NYSE:YOKU). Its Soku.com search feature indexes and lists videos from across the Chinese web, including those of its rivals. But Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), LeTV, and Sohu’s (NASDAQ:SOHU) video portal have all teamed up to tackle Youku over what they claim to be unfair search results on Soku.

And so the Tudou, LeTV, and Sohu TV sites have blocked Soku from indexing its content, perhaps hoping users will just come direct to their own sites to search for their licensed TV shows and movies. Or use Baidu.com (NASDAQ:BIDU) instead. The sites seem to be risking losing traffic from Soku, but then hope to gain the advantage of weakening the market leader’s product. In response to this, a Youku representative told the Chinese media that this “closed door” method made no sense. The rep added:

Tudou is, in the 21st century, taking an 18th century style approach with its isolationism, which abandons the user’s needs.

A search today for a very popular Taiwanese show – the one at the centre of a still unresolved copyright spat between Tudou and Youku – shows no results for Tudou, which also has rights to the series, and so its blocking of Soku seems to be working. It’s not clear how it’s being implemented, as the tudou.com/robots.txt file does not show it to be disallowing any third-party ‘web spiders’ to crawl the internet and index content.

Do you have a search warrant?

Soku launched last May and was designed by Youku to be an impartial video search engine with an open API and social sharing features.

The whole situation is similar to the e-commerce search controversy last year which saw Alibaba’s etao.com product search engine being blocked by initially just 360buy, and later by a few other rivals too. In both cases, smaller sites are rebelling against being indexed by the market leader in each sector, feeling that it might be a better strategy to battle the giant rather than dance to its tune.

We’ve contacted both Youku and Tudou to comment on the situation, and will update the post if we hear back.

[Source of quotes: QQ Tech (article in Chinese)]