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 ...

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

History

Sohu was founded as Internet Technologies China (ITC) in 1996 by Charles Zhang after he completed his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

from the

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

and received venture capital 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. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

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 adjacen ...

. Sohu's Sogou.com search engine was in talks to be sold in July 2013 to Qihoo for around $1.