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SOHU » Topics » Search Engine-Sogou.com

These excerpts taken from the SOHU 10-K filed Feb 26, 2009.

Search Engine—Sogou.com

Sogou, which means “Search Dog”, is Sohu’s proprietary search engine launched in August 2004. Sogou performs interactive searches of billions of Web pages using advanced algorithms. The user is taken through a fast and convenient interactive process to reach the most relevant selection of the integrated Website and page search results. Sogou can provide our users with high updating speeds, short search times and accurate search results, based on a large database capacity of more than twenty billion retrieved pages. We will continue to update Sogou search engine with more rich and varied content, in order to enhance user experience and grow search traffic.

Search Engine—Sogou.com

Sogou, which
means “Search Dog”, is Sohu’s proprietary search engine launched in August 2004. Sogou performs interactive searches of billions of Web pages using advanced algorithms. The user is taken through a fast and convenient interactive
process to reach the most relevant selection of the integrated Website and page search results. Sogou can provide our users with high updating speeds, short search times and accurate search results, based on a large database capacity of more than
twenty billion retrieved pages. We will continue to update Sogou search engine with more rich and varied content, in order to enhance user experience and grow search traffic.

FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="2">Products and Services

In brand advertising, we enjoy a strong competitive position as one of the top portals in
China. We provide brand advertising services across our matrices of Web properties. Our offerings enable advertisers to post their advertisements in different forms, including textual, rich media and graphic advertisements, and in different
locations on the Sohu matrix of Web properties. Our brand advertising products include but are not limited to banners, links, logos, buttons and stream advertisements placed on our Websites and sponsorships that typically focus on a particular event
or a particular Website area. We charge advertisers daily or hourly rates for banners, links, logos, buttons and stream advertisements. Sponsorship contracts for a particular area of a Website or for a particular event may require fixed payments
over the contract period. Our standard advertising charges vary depending on the terms of the contract and the advertisement’s location within our Website. Discounts from standard rates are typically provided for higher-volume, longer-term
advertising contracts, and may be provided for promotional purposes.

We rely on both direct sales by our internal sales force and sales by advertising
agents for advertising on our Websites. During the year ended December 31, 2008, approximately 1,140 companies advertised on our Websites. Our customers include multinational companies that have significant operations in Chinese markets, many
of which are Fortune 500 companies, as well as numerous Chinese domestic companies, which are mainly large or medium size companies. We plan to continue focusing on multinational and Chinese domestic companies as our key advertisers. In 2008, our
five largest advertisers accounted for approximately 15% of total brand advertising revenues. Sohu has entered into agreements with each of these advertisers. Most of these agreements have terms of less than 12 months.

STYLE="margin-top:12px;margin-bottom:0px">As of December 31, 2008, we had obligations to provide, and advertisers had obligations to purchase, advertising services under existing contracts in the amount of
$0.9 million, which were required to be provided during the year ending December 31, 2009.

Aggregated Content

STYLE="margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:0px">We are also a leading aggregator of content, and provide content on a variety of topics. We organize our content around 40 main channels on the Sohu portal. Each main
channel contains numerous sub-channels and features news, commentaries and various utilities and solutions relating to a specific topic. Our regional Websites have extensive reach across China. For example, Focus.cn, has penetrated 30 first and
second tier cities in China. As of December 31, 2008, we had over 1,700 content partners, which enable us to provide a wide range of content offerings. Our content partners include leading Chinese language media and information providers in a
variety of fields, such as CCTV, covering major cities in China, as well as prestigious international content providers such as the NBA and Reuters. Our arrangements with content partners are normally short-term and non-exclusive. In addition, we
have established exclusive partnership/sponsorships with some of our important content partners and sponsors, including the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, Team China and China Interactive Sports. Such exclusive content partnerships or sponsorships
enable us to differentiate our brand advertising offering from other brands and to improve and strengthen our brand.

All of our channels, including
co-branded third party content on our portal, are defined by the following features, that together constitute the distinct Sohu “look and feel”: the Sohu.com logo, the “Search Fox” mascot that displays different postures in
different channels, the navigation bar, the color combination, the size and type of the Chinese characters, the spacing of the characters used in our directories and the reporting style. Below are descriptions of some of our main channels:

 



















News  Delivers a comprehensive selection of local, national and international news from newspapers, magazines and other information providers throughout China. Full text search is also available on
each page.
Entertainment  Contains extensive coverage of entertainment areas that are of interest to Chinese users, including movies, television programs, plays, operas and popular and classical
music.

 


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Sports  Provides the latest in national and international sports headlines, results, commentaries and analyses as well as exclusive contents obtained from exclusive partners, such as the NBA, and Team
China.
Business and Finance  Features business and financial news provided by leading financial information services in China covering both domestic and international markets. Users can retrieve real-time stock quotes, fund
price, exchange rates, annual reports, research reports and other information on selected listed companies in China.
Information Technology  Includes industry forums, industry policies and trends, and online communications with the CEOs of the top Chinese companies in the information technology industry. Features information
technology news, product reviews and software downloads.
Automobile  Includes industry forums, industry policies and trends, and online communications with the CEOs of the top Chinese automakers. Also provides automobile features, news, and product
previews.
Real Estate  Together with Focus.cn, this channel offers directories of apartment, residential housing and commercial housing listings in major cities in China, and publishes advice and information on
general real estate and home furnishing matters.
Women  Covers a broad range of lifestyle-related topics that are of particular interest to Chinese women, including fashion and trends, beauty, society, emotion and other areas.

Streaming Online Videos

FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="2">In addition to providing traditional text and picture-based content, we have focused on developing new media technologies. We have launched online TV-like channels, such as v.Sohu for entertainment, s.Sohu for sports
and tv.Sohu for TV programs, specifically geared for video content. In addition to watching pre-set programs with broadcasting schedules, users can also enjoy certain programs on an on-demand basis.

STYLE="margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:0px">Communication and Community Tools

We offer a variety of
communication and community tools for our Chinese online users that are important in promoting user affinity to our portal network:

 








































Alumni Club  Alumni Club is a database service containing information on schools, classes and classmates that allows classmates to communicate and find each other. As of December 31, 2008, there were
over eighty million registered users.
Blogs  Blogs is an interactive platform for users to build their own space by posting their articles and pictures, uploading videos, and allow sharing of information amongst users. Further, Sohu
blogs provide unique facility for personalized blog’s front page layout, interactive communication facilities for blog users and services integrated with a selection of Sohu products. In January 2008, we opened the development platform on Sohu
Blogs to all third-party developers through “open widget”, through which developers could rapidly develop and distribute their widgets to massive Sohu bloggers on Sohu’s platform. Sohu bloggers can choose any of such widgets and apply
them to their blogs according to their own preference. Our continuous enhancements to upgrade Sohu Blogs to build up a community-based personal space have been well received by our users, especially by the young consuming generation, and we believe
more and more bloggers are converting their Sohu blogs into their personalized portal or space.
E-Mail  We offer e-mail services to our users with up to two gigabytes free memory.
Message Boards  Users can post and exchange information on message boards covering 16 main topics, ranging from education and travel to fashion, sports and all news web pages.
Web Messenger  Our web-based messenger enable Sohu registers to communicate with other users freely by sending instant messages to registers throughout the Sohu matrix.

Sogou Pinyin

SIZE="2">Sogou Pinyin is our self-developed Chinese Character Input Method software, whose vocabulary database is tied to the search queries database of Sogou search engine and thus can capture the latest trend of words used by Internet users. Since
its launch in 2006, Sogou Pinyin has been well received by users. It continues to gain popularity and expand market share through superior product quality and effective marketing campaigns. As of December 31, 2008, Sogou Pinyin had been
installed in over 50% of PC’s in China. We also launched the mobile version of Sogou Pinyin, which we believe is another example of how Sohu is pioneering in the large and growing mobile Internet market.

STYLE="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> 


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EXCERPTS ON THIS PAGE:

10-K (2 sections)
Feb 26, 2009

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