Recent gains in online search by Qihoo 360 (NYSE: QIHU) and Sohu's (Nasdaq: SOHU) Sogou are in the headlines today, highlighting the challenges industry leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) is facing from a new rival that is quickly gaining momentum and an older rival that also appears to be gaining some traction. At the centre of the story is new data for October showing that Qihoo controlled nearly
10 per cent of the China search market, just three months after the company launched an innovative new search engine. Meantime, Sohu's Sogou search engine, launched nearly a decade ago, also posted a respectable 7.5 per cent share, as it reported its search revenue more than doubled in its latest reporting quarter.
I should start off by saying that I'm just slightly skeptical of this new data, as it comes from a web analysis unit of e-commerce leader Alibaba, which seems to consider Baidu a bitter enemy even though the two companies operate in completely different areas of the Internet. But let's assume that the data is relatively reliable, which means that Qihoo and Sohu now
collectively control about 15 per cent of the China search market. Baidu continued to dominate the market with 74 per cent share, while the only other significant names on the list were Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) at 5 per cent and Tencent's (
0700.HK) Soso at 3.5 per cent.