Sogou

For the Japanese department store, see Sogo.

Sogou, Inc.
搜狗公司

220px
Type	Public company, subsidiary
Founded	9 August 2010 (2010-08-09)
Headquarters	Beijing, China
Industry	Internet
Website	Sogou.com

Sogou, Inc. is a subsidiary of Sohu, Inc. founded on 9 August 2010. It is the owner and developer of Sogou (Chinese: 搜狗; pinyin: Sōugǒu; literally: "Search dog") search engine, Sogou Input and Sogou browser.

The Sogou web spider does not respect the robots.txt internet standard, and is therefore banned from many web sites because of excessive crawling.

Products

Sogou
搜狗

250px Website screenshot
Web address	www.sogou.com
Commercial?	yes
Available in	Chinese
Users	400 million
Owner	Sogou, Inc. (subsidiary of Sohu, Inc.)
Launched	4 August 2004 (2004-08-04)
Alexa rank	137 (April 2014)
Current status	Active

Search engine and web applications

Sogou search engine (Sogou.com) was launched on 3 August 2004.

Sogou's web application products are designed to classify on-line information, such as music, picture, video clip, news, map and vertical information.

Sogou Input

Main article: Sogou Pinyin

Initially released in 2006, Sogou Pinyin is the most popular Chinese input software in China. It makes use of its search engine techniques which are the analysis and categorization of the most popular words or phrases on the Internet.

Sogou browser

Started in December 2008, Sogou browser adopts a "dual-core" (Google Chrome's WebKit and Internet Explorer's Trident layout engines) techniques and it connects to the cloud to recognize malicious websites and software.

Investment

On 17 September 2013, it was announced that Tencent has acquired a 36.5% stake in Sogou.com for US$448 million.

Blocking

To block Sogou on Apache HTTP Server (except for the robots.txt file), use:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Sogou web spider [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots\.txt$
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

To block Sogou on Nginx web server use:

if ($http_user_agent ~ "Sogou web spider") {
  return 400;
}

External links

• Sogou – official site (in Chinese)