Sohu, Inc. () is a Chinese Internet company headquartered in the Sohu Internet Plaza in

Haidian District Haidian District () is a district of the municipality of Beijing. It is mostly situated in northwestern Beijing, but also to a lesser extent in the west, where it has borders with Xicheng District and Fengtai District. It is 431 square km in a ...

, Beijing. Sohu and its subsidiaries offer advertising, a search engine (Sogou.com), on-line multiplayer

gaming Gaming may refer to: Games and sports The act of playing games, as in: * Legalized gambling, playing games of chance for money, often referred to in law as "gaming" * Playing a role-playing game, in which players assume fictional roles * Playin ...

(ChangYou.com) and other services.

History

Sohu was founded as Internet Technologies China (ITC) in 1996 by

Charles Zhang Charles Zhang or Zhang Chaoyang () (born October 31, 1964) is a Chinese businessman, investor and the founder, chairman and current CEO of Sohu, Sohu Inc (Chinese: 搜狐). Sohu Inc is listed to trade on NASDAQ and now has around 14,200 employees ...

after he completed his PhD from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

and received

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

funding from colleagues he met there. The following year, Zhang changed the name of ITC to Sohoo in homage to

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

after meeting its cofounder, Jerry Yang; the name was soon after changed to Sohu to differentiate it from the American company. Sohu has been listed on NASDAQ since 2000 through a variable interest entity (VIE) based in

Delaware Delaware ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Maryland to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. The state takes its name from the adjacent Del ...

. Sohu's

Sogou.com Sogou, Inc. () is a Chinese technology company that offers a search engine. It is a subsidiary of Tencent. The offices of Sogou are located on the southeast corner of Tsinghua University in Beijing. Sogou also has offices in Chengdu co-locate ...

search engine was in talks to be sold in July 2013 to

Qihoo Qihoo 360 (; approximate pronunciation CHEE-hoo), full name 360 Security Technology Inc., is a Chinese internet security company that has developed the antivirus software programs 360 Safeguard and 360 Mobile Safe, the Web browser 360 Secure Brows ...

for around $1.4 billion. On September 17, 2013, it was announced that

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. () is a Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world based on revenue. It is also the w ...

has invested $448 million for a minority share in Chinese search engine

, the subsidiary of Sohu, Inc. Sohu was ranked as the world's third- and twelfth-fastest growing company by Fortune in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

Allegations against Google

On April 6, 2007, Sohu made a request that

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

stop providing its

Google Pinyin Google Pinyin IME ( zh, t=谷歌拼音輸入法, s=谷歌拼音输入法, p=Gǔgē Pīnyīn Shūrùfǎ) was an input method developed by Google China Labs. The tool was made publicly available on April 4, 2007. Aside from Pinyin input, it also in ...

Input Method Editor An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...

software for download because portions of Sohu's IME software,

Sogou Pinyin Sogou Pinyin Method () is a popular Chinese Pinyin input method editor developed by Sohu.com, Inc. under its search engine brand name, Sogou. Sogou Pinyin is a dominant input software in China. By July 2011, Sogou Pinyin had an 83.6% penetrati ...

, were allegedly copied in order to construct it. The detection of the alleged copyright infringement was found due to a suspicious error found in both IMEs, notably the translation of the pinyin "pinggong" which erroneously produces the actor and comedian

Feng Gong Feng Gong (; born 6 December 1957) is a Chinese actor, ''xiangsheng'' performer, director, screenwriter. and politician. He is best known for his performances in the annual CCTV New Year's Gala, having made more appearances on the show than ever ...

. On April 9, 2007, Google's spokesman Cui Jin has admitted that the pinyin Google IME "was built leveraging some non-Google database resources."

2008 Olympic Games website

In November 2005, Sohu was selected to be the Official Internet Content Service Sponsor of the

Beijing 2008 Olympic Games The 2008 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XXIX Olympiad () and also known as Beijing 2008 (), were an international multisport event held from 8 to 24 August 2008, in Beijing, China. A total of 10,942 athletes from 204 Nati ...

. Sohu was provided exclusive services to construct, operate and host the official Beijing Olympics website.

References

External links

* {{Portal bar, China, Companies, Internet Internet technology companies of China Companies based in Beijing 1996 establishments in China Internet properties established in 1996 Companies listed on the Nasdaq Chinese brands 2000 initial public offerings