Chapter 282: Chen Yansen, Who Stabbed in the Back, Receives a Team-Up Invite from Zhou Hongyi!

On August 3, 360 Search launched.

Zhou Hongyi set up his stance on Weibo, waiting for Li Yanhong to respond so he could stoke the heat.

But Li Yanhong completely ignored him, disregarding Zhou Hongyi outright.

Chen Yansen sat in his office, scrolling through Lao Zhou's comment section, where black fans made up half.

"Zhou Zong, if you teach me how to cleanly uninstall 360 wallpapers, will you let me roast Baidu for you?"

"When will 360 launch its flagship phone?"

"Stop clinging—look, does Boss Li even acknowledge you?"

Chen Yansen smiled faintly; 2012 netizens spoke sharply, each line piercing straight into Zhou Hongyi's heart.

No one believes a former thug when he claims he wants to go straight.

Baidu, relying on its market monopoly, pushed paid ranking ads, polluting search quality; users had no choice but to grit their teeth and use it.

One netizen's reply was the most classic and received the most likes: "You scream about user experience, say users are your dad, your mom, but at the critical moment, you turn your back on everyone, treating your own parents like trash."

This line insulted both Li Yanhong and Zhou Hongyi.

Is Baidu Search anything good? Is 360 Search clean?

We're all thugs—why pretend to be virtuous here?

At that moment, the phone on the desk rang.

Chen Yansen glanced at the caller ID and pressed answer and speakerphone.

"Boss, should Lingxi Search launch early to piggyback on Zhou Hongyi's traffic?" Zhang Yiming asked bluntly.

From May to July, Kuai Di Taxi burned through four to five hundred million yuan due to subsidy warfare.

Had Baidu not intervened, with today's capital investment style, they would never have joined DiDi's Series B funding.

At that point, Cheng Wei would either shut down the product or sell it to Kuai Di.

Li Yanhong's move severely hampered Kuai Di Taxi's expansion, so Chen Yansen naturally wanted to give him some trouble.

The day after Baidu announced its investment in DiDi, Chen Yansen immediately ordered Zhang Yiming to launch the Lingxi Search development project.

"Piggybacking on traffic? Unnecessary! Lingxi Search isn't 360's appendage—we don't take sides, just stay independent. If Lingxi's search quality and algorithms have no bugs, launching early is fine."

Chen Yansen replied.

Lingxi Search is embedded in Lingxi Browser, comes with built-in traffic, and has extremely strong defenses—Baidu cannot break in; every additional mobile search user means one less user for Baidu.

The same applies to PC—Lingxi Search is barefoot, unafraid of shoes, with zero market share.

Even seizing just 5% of Baidu's market would be a victory for Chen Yansen.

"Functional testing is OK, sufficient for daily user needs, but resources for encyclopedia and Q&A are deficient. If we scrape Baidu's content, we violate the robots. txt protocol and risk lawsuits."

Zhang Yiming thought for a moment and answered seriously.

"No problem—I've reviewed infringement cases over the past decade; the highest fine was only 480,000 yuan." Chen Yansen said calmly.

This left Zhang Yiming speechless; he grinned wryly, never expecting Chen Yansen's operational mindset was even wilder than his own to boost user retention.

"Any issues?" Chen Yansen asked, raising his voice since Zhang Yiming stayed silent.

"No issues." Zhang Yiming gritted his teeth and reluctantly agreed.

What's a few inspection offices and courts?

He wasn't unfamiliar with them!

Under Chen Yansen's orders, Zhang Yiming began recklessly scraping content from Baidu Zhidao, Baidu Baike, and Baidu Tieba, converting it into Lingxi Search results.

In fact, 360 Search did the same thing!

Worst case, we fight a lawsuit—drag it out for a year or two; compared to search market share, a few hundred thousand yuan in fines is nothing.

Chen Yansen didn't care—after all, ByteDance's legal representative was Zhang Yiming; if the big bosses upstairs couldn't stand it, Zhang Yiming would be the one suffering.

On the first day of 360 Search's launch, leveraging 360 Browser and portal traffic advantages, it rapidly seized search market share, surging from 0 to 1.09%.

Over half of Google Search's Chinese traffic came from 360's portal; after Zhou Hongyi switched the default search engine to 360 Search, Google took the first hit, immediately losing 16.7% of its China market share.

At that moment, Liu Yun, head of Google Greater China, stared blankly and cursed: "360 was supposed to target Baidu—why is the spearpoint now aimed at Google's forehead?"

On the first day of the battle between 360 and Baidu Search, Baidu was unharmed, Google was bruised and swollen.

The next day, 360 Search's market share rose to 2.63%.

The third day, 360 Search's market share rose to 3.91%.

Li Yanhong grew restless, sensing Zhou Hongyi's offensive was fierce—but could he stop 360 from launching a search engine?

On August 6, Lingxi Search quietly launched without warning, leveraging Lingxi Browser's 30 million users to quickly carve out its own territory.

On August 7, 360 Search's market share rose to 5.84%. Meanwhile, Baidu noticed 360's antics: 360 Baike not only plagiarized Baidu Baike entries but openly bypassed robots. txt, treating Baidu's data as its own.

Baidu immediately responded on its official Weibo account for the first time: "We welcome fair competition, but oppose bottomless infringement."

And they @Zhou Hongyi, demanding 360 immediately cease illegal scraping.

Zhou Hongyi smiled after reading it, acted as if he hadn't seen it, continued as before, even blocking Baidu's hao123 portal site.

Any user who installed 360 Security Guard would see a blocking alert when opening hao123: "This site may be stealing your personal or financial information."

The tactic was despicable, the effect striking.

That day, hao123's traffic plummeted by 14.2% due to 360's actions.

Remember, in 2012, 360 Security Guard had 470 million installations—nearly 80% of netizens had it on their computers.

Of course, this included some users who wanted to uninstall it but couldn't.

Faced with Zhou Hongyi's thug tactics, Li Yanhong could no longer hold back—he struck back immediately, revoking 360 Search's access to Baidu Zhidao, Baike, and Tieba; clicking any 360 search result forced users to jump to Baidu's homepage.

Zhou Hongyi quickly responded, replacing all Baidu products—news, maps, MP3s—on 360 Portal with Toutiao, Gao De Maps, and Sogou Music.

The two had completely torn off the mask.

Then Zhou Hongyi posted on Weibo: "Baidu Antivirus is rogue software—users cannot uninstall it. The 360 security team will soon release a dedicated plugin to uninstall Baidu Antivirus."

When Chen Yansen saw Old Zhou's post, he couldn't help but blush for him.

The netizens couldn't hold it in either!

How Zhou Hongyi made his fortune, everyone knew perfectly well.

The old rogue berates the big rogue!

Meanwhile.

Also in Yanjing, Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan stared intently at last week's business report, his brows knit together.

Although Sogou Search mainly got its traffic through its own browser and paid channels, with low user overlap with 360 and Baidu, there were still some overlapping users after all.

Sogou's market share had dropped from 7.44% to 7.21%—not a big decline, but it left Wang Xiaochuan very unhappy.

He couldn't stand Baidu's monopolistic behavior, and he also looked down on 360's rogue tactics.

Wang Xiaochuan was scrolling through Weibo at the war of words between Zhou Hongyi and Baidu, curled his lip and said dismissively: Old Zhou is still the same old trick—product not yet launched, public opinion first.

Win or lose, curse to your heart's content first.

Obviously, Zhou Hongyi had reaped the traffic dividend from the success of the 360 Phone, running the same playbook against Lei Yijun and Li Yanhong in turn.

"@SogouWang Xiaochuan CEO Wang, say something! If Sogou doesn't join the fight again, its market ranking will drop from second to third!"

"@SohuZhang Chaoyang CEO Zhang, stop busy singing and come out to fight!"

Wang Xiaochuan smiled and shook his head, thought for a moment, then replied: "360 is 3, Sogou is s, Baidu is b—I think it's better if Sogou doesn't join the fight, lest we become 3sb!"

Wang Xiaochuan's teasing words were quoted by many netizens, and the fame of the 3B search engine war grew louder and louder.

Lingxi Search hid in the back, silently snatching Baidu Search's market share.

It wasn't until August 9th, when Lingxi Search's market share reached 1%, that it entered the sight of Baidu, 360, and Sogou.

After some investigation, Li Yanhong knew Chen Yansen was behind it; after a little thought, he understood the other's intent.

Setting aside Gao De Maps, just from the ride-hailing war, the two had already gotten their grudge.

Chen Yansen quietly launched the search business, clearly intending to use peripheral business to attack Baidu's core business.

Zhou Hongyi was the most impatient—upon learning that Lingxi Search was Chen Yansen's product, he made a call right away.

"Chen, no wonder we get along so well—turns out we're kindred spirits." Zhou Hongyi said with a smile.

Lingxi Search and 360 Search operated in exactly the same way, completely disregarding Baidu's robots crawler, frantically scraping away.

"Zhou, you've got it wrong. Mainly because Baidu Search has too many ads, I made a clean, ad-free search product."

Chen Yansen answered off the cuff, half-truth half-false.

"Take down Baidu together?" Zhou Hongyi issued a team-up invitation.

Chen Yansen gave a knowing smile, chatted with Zhou Hongyi for ten minutes, then hung up.

Lingxi Search and Sohu Search had similar business ecosystems, mainly centered on mobile browser usage scenarios, extremely defensive, with low overlap with 360 and Baidu.

So Chen Yansen politely declined the invitation, but provided Zhou Hongyi with a technical solution to resolve Baidu Search's blocking—anything that could cause Li Yanhong trouble, Chen Yansen certainly wouldn't pass up.

Let Zhou Hongyi charge at the front; Lingxi would lurk in the back and quietly develop.

Two days later, when 360 users used 360 Search in the 360 Browser to view search results related to Baidu products, they would be redirected to a 'Web Snapshot' page.

The content was still Baidu's, but 360 Search stood in the middle and intercepted the users, not giving Baidu a single bit of traffic.

Freeloading, and damn well not paying a cent!

On August 12th, Baidu sent a lawyer's letter to 360.

(End of chapter)