Tencent Launches Yuanbao Search With 50 Billion Documents, Skipping a Fight With Baidu

Tencent launched Yuanbao Search on Wednesday, an AI-powered search platform the company says indexes more than 50 billion documents and over 150 billion vector entries, as it folds its Sogou and WeChat search tools into a single brand.

Unlike OpenAI and Google, which build search results directly into their chatbots, Tencent is positioning Yuanbao as a separate infrastructure layer that other companies can license through an API, according to Ma Jin, vice president of Tencent Cloud and head of the Yuanbao Search team, cited in a Tiger Brokers research note.

Tencent has begun redirecting some search traffic from Sogou, the search engine it fully acquired in 2021, to Yuanbao, and the newest version of QQ Browser now lists Yuanbao as its default search engine, according to a report from financial media outlet MarsBit. The platform also draws on WeChat's built-in "Search One Search" feature and content from WeChat official accounts and video posts.

Yuanbao Search covers 13 industry verticals and has struck partnerships with 157 sources Tencent describes as authoritative, Tiger Brokers reported. The company is packaging the search API into cloud bundles aimed at four categories of customers: large language model developers, automakers building AI features into car dashboards, office software makers and education platforms. Tencent's own products, including Tencent Video, the ima app and WorkBuddy, are currently its largest users of the service.

A different kind of search race

Ma described the evolution of search in three stages: keyword filtering, large-language-model-generated answers and what he called agent-driven reasoning, the stage he said Yuanbao is built to serve.

"This is more about balancing content, computing power, time consumption, and cost." – Ma Jin, VP of Tencent Cloud

Tencent built its search business on Sogou, in which it first bought a 36.5 percent stake for $448 million in 2013 before acquiring the company outright in 2021. That followed an earlier, unsuccessful attempt by Tencent to challenge Baidu directly with its Soso search engine in 2006. Baidu has held the largest share of China's search market for more than two decades, and ByteDance's Doubao has emerged as a newer rival for AI-driven queries.

Tiger Brokers' analysis described Yuanbao as sidestepping that head-on consumer fight, betting instead that AI companies, including rivals, will want a neutral search backend rather than build their own. That contrasts with OpenAI and Google, which have tied search results tightly to their own chatbot products.

The analysis also flagged limits in the current version: Yuanbao does not support multi-step, or "multi-hop," search queries, it returns only titles and summaries rather than full page content, and it cannot retrieve material from sites protected by anti-crawling measures, which excludes some paywalled or premium sources.

Tencent did not disclose pricing for the Yuanbao Search API or set a revenue target for the service. The company also did not say how much consumer search volume it expects to shift from Sogou to Yuanbao, or whether it plans to retire the Sogou brand.