Small search engines: Sogou, Shenma, 360 (Haosou), Daum, Seznam
This article is an overview of five search engines which do not dominate over national markets but are quite promising. We closely monitor the development of technologies, and if you are interested to enhance the SEO of your website, then welcome to outsourcing with us!
Sogou
Sogou is a Chinese search engine created in 2010. Sogou is translated from Chinese as a “search dog”.
According to the Similarweb statistics, the Sogou search engine traffic is more than 130 million visits per month. 92.87% of them are from China, 1.48% — from Taiwan, 1.08% — from Hong Kong, 0.95% — from the United States, 0.58% — from Malaysia, 3.04% — from other countries.
Today, Seznam takes about 8.75% of the Chinese search engine market.
In addition to site search, Sogou offers a search within the popular WeChat platform in China featuring more than 900 million active users per day. To register with Sogou, you need a Chinese phone number; you may also log in via QQ or WeChat.
SEO in Sogou
To assess the website quality, a special indicator “Sogou Rank” is used. It evaluates not only the link mass, but also internal factors such as the original content and the page structure. Priority in the search results t is given to the sites in simplified Chinese. The easiest way is to promote sites in Sogou in the domain extensions .cn and .com. The link mass from Chinese sites is very important for promotion. In addition, Sogou puts a special emphasis on the “title” tag and virtually does not respond to the “meta keyword” and “description” tags.
Advertising in Sogou
In addition to standard PPC advertising, similar to Baidu, Sogou offers advertising in the Brand Zone format, when the top of the page containing search results for brand-related words is bought out by a specific brand. Besides, Sogou has a unique advertising format associated with their Sogou Pinyin tool which simplifies text input. When using this tool, the user sees a banner relevant to the text being entered.
Shenma
A Chinese search engine developed in 2014 for mobile devices exclusively. The PC versions are not provided. The platform is owned by Alibaba Group. Shenma combines a search engine and a mobile app store. Shenma is translated from Chinese as “the search for the horse god”. Shenma is pre-installed in the UC Browser mobile browser used by approximat. 500 million users.
According to the Similarweb statistics, Shenma has more than 50 million monthly visits. 84.86% of them are from China, 5.46% — from the United States, 2.12% — from Cambodia, 1.58% — in Hong Kong, 1.35% — in Japan, 4.61% — in other countries.
Today Shenma occupies about 2.78% of the Chinese mobile search engine market lagging behind Baidu, Bing and Yandex.
You can register with the website as a webmaster via the link https://zhanzhang.sm.cn . To register, you need only an email address, no phone number is required!
SEO in Shenma
Priority in the search results is given to the goods placed on the Taobao and Tmall sites owned by Alibaba Group. This means that if you sell your products through one of these services, the promotion in Shenma becomes essential for your marketing strategy.
Advertising in Shenma
To start an advertising campaign in Shenma, you need the following:
● Chinese phone number,
● Website in simplified Chinese optimized for mobile devices,
● ICP license,
● Chinese business license,
● bank details in mainland China.
In addition, similar to other Chinese search engines, the advertising campaign shall comply with the Law on Advertising of October 27, 1994.
PPC advertising in Shenma is based on the auction pricing model and is paid for using the CPC system.
Haosou/360
In January 2015, the Chinese search engine 360 changed its name to Haosou, while the search was transferred to the domain haosou.com . In February 2016, the name 360 and the old domain were returned to the search engine. The Qihoo 360 browser, which uses this search engine by default, is pre-installed on most Chinese computers, so Haosou takes a significant share of the national market. At the same time, since 2020, Qihoo 360 has been on the US sanctions list for technology use during Chinese repressions in Xinjiang.
According to the statistics of Similarweb, the Haosou search engine have more than 100 million visits from sites https://360.cn and https://www.so.com per month.
On the website https://360.cn 93.02% of them are from China, 1.19% from the United States, 0.81% from Hong Kong, 0.79% from Taiwan, 0.71% from Malaysia, 3.49% from other countries. The website https://www.so.com has 98.81% of them from China, 0.32% — from the United States, 0.14% — from Hong Kong, 0.14% — from Taiwan, 0.09% — from Japan, 0.5% — from other countries.
Today, Seznam occupies about 3.5% of the Chinese search engine market.
Registration with the 360 is user-friendly and does not require entering a mobile phone.
Daum (다음)
Daum is a South Korean search engine launched on February 16, 1995. In 2014 Daum merged with Kakao. The word “Daum” in Korean has two meanings: “next” and “different”; it conveys the message that the company is a leader in creating the next generation communication environment.
According to the Similarweb statistics, the Daum portal features more than 250 million monthly visits. 94% of them are from South Korea, 2.63% from the United States, 0.59% from Canada, 0.36% from Japan, 0.24% from Australia, 2.19% from other countries.
According to StatCounter, Daum currently takes about 1.5% of the South Korean search engine market, lagging behind Google, Naver and Bing. However, it should be noted that these statistics is based on referrals from the Daum search engine to external sites, and do not take into account search queries referring to their own services. If we count the number of search engine visitors, the Daum market share is about 6%.
The competitive advantages used by Daum to compete for the audience are additional search services, such as: music search, object search, barcode/QR code search, and voice search.
Similar to Naver, the organic results in Daum are located at the very bottom of the page, PPC advertising and services have a significant priority over it.
Registration with Daum is shared with the Kakao service and does not require entering a mobile phone.
SEO in Daum
Daum indexes new content slower than Naver or Google, thus, SEO in this search engine takes a longer period. For the successful site promotion in Daum, the link mass shall be on Korean sites as foreign links have virtually no impact on the ranking. However, the links from other Daum services work well.
Advertising in Daum
PPC advertising in Daum (https://business .kakao.com/info/keywordad/) does not require a separate registration and can be launched from a Kakao account. However, two-factor identification using the KakaoTalk messenger is required to enter the advertising area.
In addition to PPC advertising, the area offers display advertising, video advertising, as well as several other formats. More information on the types of advertising can be found at https://business .kakao.com/info/.
Seznam
Seznam.cz is a national service founded in 1996 by Czech programmer and businessman Ivo Lukačovič. It used to be a web directory which later became a search engine. “Seznam” is translated from Czech as a “list”.
According to Similarweb, the search engine seznam.cz has a traffic of more than 250 million monthly visits. 96.52% of them are from the Czech Republic, 0.84% from Slovakia, 0.60% from Germany, 0.32% from the United States, 0.29% from the UK, 1.44% from other countries.
Now Seznam occupies about 12.81% of the Czech search engine market. As of 2009, Seznam held a leading position in the Czech Republic taking 57% of the national search engine market.
The seznam.cz search results are not much different from the Google ones. Here you can see the PPC advertising block, organic search results, image and video search blocks, wikipedia block, similar search queries.
In addition to the search, the company has other services. For example, the maps service Mapy.cz , business directory Firmy.cz , advertising service Sklik.cz , marketplace Zboží.cz , car catalog Sauto.cz , real estate database Reality.cz , travel service Sdovolená.cz , a portal of booklets and catalogs Kupi.cz .
To register with seznam.cz a Czech phone number is required.
SEO in Seznam
Since the main search engine in the Czech Republic is Google, as a rule, promotion in Seznam is conducted residually. However, it should not be neglected as the audience of this search engine has a high level of trust in local small businesses. When promoting in Seznam, one needs to have a good command of the Czech language both for the formation of the semantic kernel and for working with the internal factors of site optimization. One can add a website to Seznam through the link https://search.seznam.cz/wt/pridej-stranku .
Seznam reads the following site encodings:
● iso-8859–2,
● windows-1250,
● utf-8,
● utf-16.
If the site uses a different encoding, it will not be indexed.
An important ranking factor in Seznam is the availability of a link base from Czech and popular foreign sites. In fact, we are talking about the sites indexed by a search engine. To assess the site quality, a special indicator “S-Rank” (similar to PR) is used; the detail may be found here: https://blog.seznam.cz/slovnik/s-rank/. When building up the link mass, it is worth considering that Seznam tends to ignore the links located in the footer guided by the principle “if the user does not notice it, I will not notice it either”. The links in social networks are taken into account at ranking, but only in the case they were indexed which often becomes a problem in Seznam. One of the most popular resources in the Czech Republic used to build up the link mass is a service for article purchase Placla.cz .
Advertising in Seznam
Seznam is not limited to PPC advertising, but also offers display advertising, video advertising, advertising by its services, advertising in the partner network. To select the type of advertising, there is a simple user-friendly interface designed directly for advertisers. You can also place ads separately at each of the services by contacting the appropriate specialist.
