Top 15 Most Popular Search Engines in China (2025)

Updated on March 16th, 2025 by Quertime Team in Search Engines

The digital landscape of China is made rich and colorful by different search engines catering to the differing needs of the great expanse of the Chinese population. Of them all, Baidu is the most prominent, leading like Google everywhere else. Backed by Alibaba, Shenma is a mobile search leader; Sogou, with its deep integration into Tencent’s platforms, boasts advanced language processing; Haosou and 360 Search are also very well-established players in the market. It is important to know these search engines in order to successfully penetrate China’s online market. In China, language, culture, and regulations can create a very different dynamic affecting user preferences and behaviors.

The following is a discussion of the top 15 most famous search engines operating in China. An analysis of their features, significance, and impact on the digital space.

1. Baidu

Baidu, commonly known as the “Google of China,” is one of the most powerful and well-known global search engines within its boundaries. Established in 2000, Baidu has since become famous for web, image, and video searches. Being a user-friendly search engine with an incorporated advanced algorithm for executing searches, Baidu is the favorite of millions of Chinese Internet users. The search engine has an even wider reach than normal searches. Other services Baidu offers include maps, news, cloud storage, and AI-based solutions. Being an ever-constantly innovative entity that looks to enhance the experience of its users, Baidu has won respect as an essential element of China’s cyber realm.

2. Xiaohongshu Search Engine

Xiaohongshu, which means Little Red Book or RED, and it is a popular social e-commerce website in China dedicated mainly to lifestyle and fashion topics. With a rich variety of themes including, but not limited to, product recommendations, travel tips, and beauty tutorials, users will get recommendations and search results for those topics through the Xiaohongshu Search Engine. The platform has integrated advanced algorithms that offer search results for the specific needs and tastes of each user based on their shopping history and interaction with other social media users. With the aid of such search features, users may more easily come across and view contents or products pertaining to their particular interests. This is a means of increasing visibility of brands and merchants in promoting their offers by improving their visibility to a potential audience and, in turn, selling.

3. Weibo Search Engine

Weibo, often colloquially known as “Chinese Twitter,” is one of the major social media platforms in China. With its advanced search capabilities, the Weibo Search Engine located at s.weibo.com can enable a user to locate much of the materials that appear on the site. It is advanced in the sense that it is always fetching relevant data that is matched to your needs and provides the output almost instantly. Hot topics can be searched, followed by discussions, and numerous forms of content such as posts, pictures, videos, and hashtags can be found. Weibo keeps users updated with the current events, news, and trends taking place in China’s fast-growing social sphere. Additionally, it serves as an important tool in marketing and brand-promotion strategies, allowing businesses to reach out to Chinese consumers.

4. Shenma

Shenma, developed by the Alibaba Group, is a rapidly expanding mobile search engine in China. Launched in 2014, Shenma is specifically designed to focus on mobile optimization, which fits in well with the ever-increasing number of users that use the Internet on their mobile phones. Being a search engine with a smooth and easy interface and quick response to user searches, Shenma also offers users e-commerce, travel booking, and many more in the very results page. Being a product of Alibaba’s ecosystem, Shenma integration allows users to buy goods or reserve tickets, amongst many other services, directly from the search results. The presence of mobile-centric features and popular app integration makes Shenma a go-to choice among Chinese users for quick and easy solutions for searching.

5. Sogou

Sogou, set up in 2004, is one of China’s leading search engines known for its language-processing capabilities. Sogou offers a broad variety of services, which are represented by such services as: web, image, voice, and translation tools. Its association with Tencent, one of the major technology companies in China, increases the already great offer made by Sogou to social media and online gaming among other services provided by Tencent. The search engine also features an intelligent input method of Sogou Pinyin, which simplifies the input of Chinese characters; due to this feature, it is very popular among users because it is simple and gives accurate results. Constant innovation in AI and natural language processing technologies by Sogou makes it one of the top choices among Chinese users.

6. SO.com

Based on its features for search and security, SO.com powered by Qihoo 360 is one of the top search engines operating in China. In addition to its security-obsessed nature, the other thing that sets SO.com apart is that it has anti-phishing protection and malware-detection built into its web search platform thanks to its association with Qihoo 360, a leading name in cybersecurity. The interface of this search engine is clean and provides the fastest search results; hence, its popularity among the Chinese people. Besides that, SO.com also offers other services, such as news, shopping, and social communities for the diverse user’s interests. Therefore, SO.com has built up its very good reputation for securing user privacy and security in the highly competitive market of search engines in China.

7. Youdao

The search engine named Youdao is developed in 2007 by NetEase. Besides performing the basic searches on the Internet, image search, language translation, and educational resources are provided for all categories of end users, depending on their needs. Owing to such translation services offered by Youdao, it is considered a good translation solution and is believed to yield the best quality for all categories of users, namely, students, language learners, and even professionals. Due to the close proximity of the search engine to NetEase, one may also play online games, listen to music, and other entertainment activities. With developed skills in language and education, Youdao has attained respect and trust of the Chinese online surfers for the learning and searching for information.

8. Easou

The well-known Easou search engine in China offers its users an easy-to-navigate interface and a variety of searches. The office of Easou is situated in Beijing, which provides access to a variety of content, including web pages, images, and news. It is popular due to its search algorithms which are fast and precise in retrieving any relevant information. It is enriched with a feature of recommendation of what you might like and with voice search that made it popular among Chinese internet users.

9. Google | Google Hong Kong | Google Taiwan

Google is definitely the largest search engine service provider on the globe, particularly China. A powerful algorithm and huge index allow Google to display to its users results that relate very well to what they were searching for. In short, it is the one-stop resource to find information about everything: images, videos, maps, etc. It has billions of users worldwide. It is located in China at the address google.cn and provides localized service in China’s market. Google is quite preferred among Chinese users because of its user-friendly interface, a robust search mechanism, and seamless integration with all the other services provided by Google, like Gmail and Google Drive. A sometimes restricted and censored tool is Google, yet still a user-friendly interface, advanced search features, and a connection to the other services of Google, like Gmail and Google Drive, make it the favorite for a lot of users in China.

10. Bing China | Bing Taiwan

The China version of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, targets users who speak Chinese. Being one of the best in terms of all-around search experience, it also competes hard with other search engines existing in the Chinese market. The strength of Bing is a slim and easy-to-use interface, multimedia integrated into it, and powerful search algorithms. Users in China use Bing in a variety of ways such as Web search, image search, news, and translation. Being highly visual in its search and closely linked to the Microsoft Office and Outlook services, Bing China allows Chinese users to have a seamless experience while going online to get information.

11. Yahoo Search | Yahoo Hong Kong | Yahoo Taiwan

Yahoo Search is still one of the notable players in the Chinese search engine world, even if it is far less dominant than Google or Bing. Running from the domain search.yahoo.com, it provides a range of information-gathering tools to satisfy a user’s needs. It provides web searches, image searches, news, and so on to help users explore the world wide web through its multi-features. While it may not be the most popular search engine around, Yahoo Search is still able to gather some number of users in China thanks to its simplicity of design, vast coverage of the results, and integration with other services from Yahoo such as Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance.

12. Yandex Search

Yandex Search, among others, is one of the most famous search engines used in China; it has a very vast index and complicated search algorithms. This search engine is a product of Yandex, the famous Russian tech giant and provides access to a multitude of online resources on the Internet, such as websites, images, and videos. Alongside this, Yandex Search has been given worldwide respect because of providing precise results. This feature helps provide instant answers and even predict some searches that can actually give a good deal while looking up information in Chinese.

13. Ecosia

Ecosia has gained a huge following in China, with its eco-friendly way of operation. It uses ad revenue to fund tree planting projects around the world, which sets it apart from conventional search engines. It was a type of philanthropic business that has attracted Chinese users, those very much conscious of the environment and who wanted to contribute positively to the planet. User-friendly in appearance and performance, Ecosia also provides relevant search results. Therefore, it becomes an attractive choice for those who seek both information and a means to lend support to a cause involving environmental protection.

14. Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is an interactive computational search engine that provides users access to curated data and computational knowledge. This search engine was created by Wolfram Research. It’s able to respond with dynamic answers to complex questions. Students, researchers, and professionals all use it for their work. The Chinese are interested in Wolfram|Alpha due to its adaptability and richness of data, which transcend typical search results to include interactive graphs, charts, and computations.

15. Shodan

Shodan is a specialized search engine that focuses on the indexing of internet-connected devices and services. Mainly directed at cybersecurity professionals and researchers, Shodan allows users to identify and study devices like webcams, routers, servers, and so on. It is used by Chinese users interested in cybersecurity and network monitoring to find vulnerabilities and assess the security posture of the internet-connected devices. The database holds a wide range of data and allows for highly advanced searches, making Shodan an effective tool to understand the digital space in China and the rest of the world.

16. Lycos

The search engine known as Lycos became a large-scale portal of the Web in offering services ranging from search, e-mails, and news to other related services. Though Lycos has since then not had as much success as it had in the past, it has a large following among those who want to search quickly and effectively. Combined with the search functionality offered by the Lycos engine, the user-friendly interface and a huge database of websites that have been indexed by the engine is quite useful for online searches. Moreover, Lycos offers services such as user recommendations based on filters customized and user-defined for a wide range of users in China.