Tencent Puts Yuanbao Search on the Open Web, After Opening the Stack to Developers
Tencent Holdings has put a standalone search engine back on the open web, for the first time since it folded its last consumer search product into Sogou.
The company said on November 11 that Yuanbao Search is live at so.qq.com and can be set as the search engine in the latest version of QQ Browser. The site was reachable when ChinaBiz Insider checked it. According to Tencent’s own description, carried by IT Home and Sina Tech, the product rebuilds the search path — understanding, retrieval, ranking, and the way answers are assembled — on Yuanbao’s large-model stack. It indexes the open web, WeChat official accounts, WeChat Video Accounts, and academic literature, and it says it will put official and other authoritative sources first.
The more useful way to read the launch is not as a revival of Sosou, the search engine Tencent started in 2006 and later shut into Sogou. It is a consumer doorway to a retrieval system Tencent has already been running inside its own products, and already started selling to outside developers.
On October 20, Tencent Cloud opened Yuanbao Search to individuals and companies through Skill, MCP, and API access. Yicai, citing Tencent Cloud, said the index was already at the 100-billion scale, that daily calls had reached the hundreds of millions, and that the service supported more than 50 core businesses, including WorkBuddy, ima, Tencent FinTech, and Tencent Video. Caijing reported the same usage figures, and said the October upgrade also advertised 157 authoritative sources across 13 industries. Those are company-provided numbers. They are the reason Tencent can launch a public site now without pretending it is starting from scratch.
Li Ruizhang, who leads the consumer web product, made the intended boundary explicit. In an interview with Zhidx, he said Yuanbao Search will keep adding features, but will not evolve into an AI assistant. It is meant to stay a search product, using the model to help people query and browse. He said Tencent chose this moment because the technology and the ecosystem were mature enough, and because the stack had already been tested on the business side. The consumer site and the developer service share that underlying retrieval layer, he said, but they are different products for different users.
The distinctive inventory is WeChat. Official-account articles and Video Account clips have long been easy to find inside WeChat and awkward to find from a browser. A public search box that can pull those sources, then let a user keep asking follow-up questions, is the part of this launch that Baidu or a generic AI chatbot cannot copy from first principles. Whether the index is fresh enough is another matter. Zhidx’s own first-day tests found official-account posts that were current, and a Video Account tab that still surfaced year-old clips on at least one query. That is a single publication’s check, not a full audit, but it is a reminder that “WeChat in the index” is only as good as the crawl.
Advertising is not being left out. It is being fenced off. Sina Tech, citing Tencent, said ads will not be dressed up as answers: they sit in a separate module labeled as related ads, and can be collapsed. Li told Zhidx that the product does not reject advertising, but will mark the zone, control the format, and try to keep ads from getting in the way. That is a product claim, and a bet against the habit that made Chinese search feel like a classifieds page. It will be tested the first time a commercial query is valuable enough to crowd the results.
Tencent’s last attempt at a general search engine is the right background, and the wrong model. Sosou never displaced Baidu. In 2013 Tencent folded that business into Sogou and became a shareholder; in 2021 it took Sogou private. Yuanbao Search arrives in a different market, where the fight is less about ten blue links and more about which product users trust to answer a question and show its sources. Li’s answer, for now, is that Tencent wants the search box, not another assistant.
The open-web front end will decide whether that is a strategy or just a URL. The company has already found a use for the same retrieval stack inside WorkBuddy and other Tencent software. Putting it at so.qq.com asks a harder question: whether people will change the default search bar because they can finally look up a WeChat post from outside WeChat.
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