Before Tencent acquired Sogou, we conducted a test on WeChat search.

Yesterday, a piece of news successfully swept the Internet circle: Sogou issued an announcement saying that Tencent had made an acquisition offer to it, hoping to acquire Sogou for US$2 billion. Judging from the reaction of Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, the probability of success of this acquisition is extremely high.

Within a day, many media have analyzed the importance of Sogou's "search + AI" business to Tencent. Compared with the "Four AI Dragons" that are now dominating the market, Sogou's voice recognition and search business is more to Tencent's liking and the price is cheaper. The success of this merger and acquisition will help Tencent strengthen its own Internet ecosystem.

But for Xiao Lei, Tencent’s acquisition of Sogou may have another purpose: to improve its own WeChat search business.

In-depth articles are hard to get noticed

As the most popular new media platform today (perhaps the only one), WeChat public accounts are still an important tool for various media to output information.

According to a joint survey conducted by NetEase and Xinbang, on October 25, 2019 alone, WeChat generated 720,000 articles, of which 2,900 articles had over 10,000 views. Thanks to the enthusiastic support of readers, Tianlei Technology's article became one of the 2,900 lucky ones.

There are many self-media like Lei Technology on WeChat. As a practitioner, Xiao Lei knows the importance of content dissemination to every media person. In addition to the "freshness" of the content, the most important thing is the depth of the content. Behind the completion of each in-depth article is the result of several discussions and deletions, and WeChat is a platform for preserving this labor crystallization. The in-depth articles on the platform are also an important reference for Xiao Lei to further study.

Unfortunately, the built-in search function of WeChat is not very good at digging out the in-depth content on the platform. In fact, Xiao Lei’s way of obtaining in-depth information is not done within WeChat, but through the lead-generating articles published by public accounts on media platforms such as 36Kr, Weibo, and Zhihu, and then returning to WeChat to subscribe to the corresponding public accounts.

According to Xiaolei’s experience, publicity on other platforms is crucial for every self-media person. If an article is only posted on WeChat, it is difficult to attract traffic within WeChat unless it is a “hot” article that directly points to social phenomena. Therefore, for public accounts, the title and content are equally important, because the title can increase the number of clicks and the content can increase the number of reposts. The “title party” and “Mimeng style” that we hate are probably the best strategies to successfully stir up the stagnant water in the WeChat ecosystem.

Xiao Lei believes that the simplicity of WeChat search is an important reason why in-depth articles have difficulty coming to the fore.

The flaw in WeChat search

Xiao Lei took the front-page article of Lei Technology the day before yesterday, "Will this be the killer feature of Huawei P50 and Xiaomi 11?" as an example. This article mainly discussed the development trend of future mobile phone flagships, focusing on photography. The article has been read 30,000 times, which is a very high number of times under the relevant topic tag.

But Xiao Lei searched for "Xiaomi 11" and "Huawei P50" as keywords respectively. In the default search bar of WeChat, this article from Lei Technology was ranked around 50 or 60.

Are the articles at the front very popular? No, except for the first one, the number of views of the articles at the top generally does not exceed 10,000. There are even articles with only a few hundred views at the top. When you click on them, you can see that the articles are written in the style of short information, not long articles with in-depth analysis.

The subsequent search results were even more chaotic. Xiaolei searched for "Xiaomi 11", a complete word, but WeChat "intelligently" associated it with "Xiaomi + MIUI11" and "Xiaomi + Double 11". Among the first 60 articles, less than one-third of them had more than 30,000 views than Xiaolei, and most of them hovered around a few thousand.

If you filter by the built-in "reading volume sorting" function in WeChat, a large number of irrelevant news will be included in the search results. In this filtering mode, WeChat expands the keyword search for "Xiaomi+11" from the title to the full text, and irrelevant information such as iPhone 11, 11 am, and press conference on the 11th will also be included in WeChat's search results.

Originally, if WeChat had honestly followed the mechanism of "title search + reading volume ranking", even if the search results were cut in by keywords such as "MIUI 11", it would have been in the top 20. But now, this article with 30,000 readings has been completely submerged in all the articles about Xiaomi since 2015.

On Baidu and Google, the term "Xiaomi 11" can be correctly associated by search engines as "the next generation model of Xiaomi 10", and only occasionally will a split association occur (Sogou's search results are only slightly better than WeChat).

And in professional search mode, you can also remove "MIUI 11" from the keywords, or set a specific search within a certain time period to minimize irrelevant information.

If this is the case with WeChat headlines that have guaranteed readership, then in-depth articles that don’t focus on readership (usually two or three) will never be able to make it to the top. Xiaolei’s titles are relatively simple and clear, and the audience can see the key information at a glance. If the titles are more tortuous and the number of fans is smaller, many in-depth articles are doomed to be buried under irrelevant information. Xiaolei has also seen many good articles that are listed on media platforms such as 36kr, but the WeChat readership of the author’s public account is less than 10,000.

From Xiaolei's experience, if you are a person who pays attention to social livelihood and likes to read current affairs news at a fast pace, WeChat search will fully meet your expectations. But if you want to find a well-written in-depth article by searching keywords on WeChat, it will most likely disappoint you.

WeChat’s self-improvement

In fact, WeChat is also trying to change the current problem of public accounts where "traffic winner takes all, while in-depth content takes a back seat."

Zhang Xiaolong emphasized at the WeChat Open Class in 2020 that in an era where everyone can create, WeChat hopes that long-tail small accounts will have their own living space. WeChat will grasp the scale of screening and push more accurately, allowing users to receive more and better massive information.

From the news of Tencent's acquisition of Sogou today, we can also see that Tencent attaches great importance to search. Previously, Sogou's search business supported websites such as Zhihu, which greatly improved the search quality of these websites and realized the "internal circulation" of content. After that, Sogou also cooperated with Tencent to support off-site search of WeChat content. In this Sogou acquisition case, Tencent probably hopes that Sogou's mature search business model can successfully break through the relatively isolated ecological model of WeChat.

When giants such as Baidu began to try to "jump out of the search box" and look for the next generation of search, WeChat, a national application, finally began to make up for its shortcomings.