ByteDance to Build a Search Engine for China
Posted on 08/13/2019
Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. (Beijing ByteDance Technology Co Ltd.) is the creator of the viral short-video app TikTok, which competes against Snap and Instragram stories.
ByteDance started as a news aggregator (Jinri Toutiao) and then it launched its TikTok app. ByteDance now launched a search engine called Toutiao Search that bears some resemblance to Google’s search engine. In 2010, Google left the Chinese search engine market over government censorship issues, giving Baidu almost a near monopoly on internet search. ByteDance hired technical experts from Google, Baidu, and Bing (a search engine owned by Microsoft Corporation).