On September 14, 2020, Alibaba’s smart search app “Quark” officially launched a new medical search function. Quark covers nearly 10,000 common diseases inquiries, and also launched AI consultation and expert question and answer services. Quark broadens the application scenarios of “content + service” in the medical and health field.

The Quark user group is quite niche, and most of them are young Chinese, especially young people under the age of 25 occupy a very high proportion. Quark relies on word-of-mouth communication among users. Quark is Ali’s third bet in the field of Chinese search engines.

Ali is not only obsessed with search engines. It has always been an important strategy for IT giants to seize user traffic and build a content ecosystem.

In June 2020, the Chinese search engine market accounted for 66.15% of Baidu, 22.06% of Sogou, 3.4% of Haosou, 3.16% of Google, 2.51% of Shenma, and only 2.72% of others. Although Baidu has always been the first in the market share, with the loss of a little bit, the search engine market competition continues to surge. In December 2019, Baidu search market accounted for 67.09%, Sogou search accounted for 18.75%, and Shenma search accounted for 6.84%.

Even if the market share is stable, no one wants to give up this piece of cake. It is expected that China’s search engine market will continue to maintain a relatively steady growth rate in the next few years. By 2025, the market size is expected to be close to 168 billion yuan.

The application of search engines is constantly expanding, such as search engine + AI + medical. IT giants study user behavior, meet user needs, and grab user attention, and these are the focus of their search engines.