Tencent has pushed into news feed and search functions in a direct challenge to Chinese search engine Baidu, as the country’s biggest internet group ramps up competition to keep users within single platforms.
The 770m who use WeChat, the dominant social messaging app owned by Tencent, received an update on Wednesday placing the two new functions on the user interface. The news feed and search tools pull content only from within WeChat’s walls rather than from the open web, including updates posted by individual users called moments, corporate accounts and a huge collection of WeChat accounts used by newspapers and independent bloggers.
Even though articles published on WeChat have their own web pages, Baidu is blocked from indexing them. This means they do not appear in the company’s search results.