Sohu

History

Sohu was founded as Internet Technologies China (ITC) in 1996 by Charles Zhang after he completed his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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! after meeting its cofounder, Jerry Yang; the name was soon after changed to Sohu to differentiate it from the American company.

In 2000, Sohu (NASDAQ: SOHU) was officially listed on NASDAQ, through a variable interest entity (VIE). Later that same year, in September, announced Sohu the acquisition of ChinaRen, one of China's largest youth community websites. In October, Sohu was ranked by Forbes among the "300 Best Small Companies in the World."

Sohu's search engine Sogou entered talks in July 2013 to be sold to Qihoo for around $1.4 billion, although the deal did not go through. In September 2013, it was announced that Tencent invested $448 million for a minority share in Chinese search engine Sogou. Around the same period, Tencent discontinued its Soso search engine and its search-related assets were integrated into Sogou. In 2021, Tencent completed its acquisition of Sogou, taking it private.

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

2008 Olympic Games Coverage

In November 2005, Sohu was selected to be the Official Internet Content Service Sponsor of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Sohu was provided exclusive services to construct, operate and host the official Beijing Olympics website. During the first week of the Olympics, Sohu recorded peak traffic levels, including 3 million visits within 5 minutes and over 100 million visits within one hour, setting multiple records.