Yunyun (云云): Social Search Meets Q&A

On the heels of Google’s new social search features, I’d like to introduce a Chinese social search startup by a team of ex-Googlers: Yunyun.com (云云). Yunyun’s social search merges websites, question-and-answer (Q&A), and Weibo (microblog) results.

Yun means cloud in Chinese and Yunyun has lofty ambitions. Co-founder Jia Sheng says:

“The problem we want to solve is to simply make search better by leveraging the knowledge from your social network. To achieve this, it’s far from enough to just crawl other social networks (and most are not crawlable). You need to understand your users deeply. Thus we decide to build our own social network (of course we do integrate as much external social data as possible). And we built a full fledged search engine from scratch within the past year.

It’s a big and tough problem. Nobody has successfully tackled it before and we are also learning and tuning.”

It’s also a tricky concept to envision in the abstract, so here are two concrete examples:

1) Search for “云云 定位” (Yunyun positioning)

The first two search results are drawn from Yunyun’s Quora-like Q&A service, describing in detail how Yunyun compares to other products. This is clearly a superior result to Baidu’s results, but also challenging to scale. It relies upon users contributing comprehensive and high-quality responses to Yunyun’s own Q&A.

2) Search for “TechRice”

Yunyun serves up solid search results and adds in our Sina Weibo account, an incremental improvement over Baidu (which still seem to lack any smidgeon of social DNA). In the future, Yunyun’s approach of mining social connections could also improve ‘people search’ results, a notoriously vexing problem in a nation where so many share the same name (I’m guessing there are thousands who share my Chinese name 卢凯).

1 + 1 > 2

Yunyun’s make-or-break challenge is that it’s insufficient for 1 + 1 = 2, as one Yunyun user (Weifeng Zhang) astutely observes. It’ll never challenge Baidu in pure search, nor would it be wise to directly assault Zhihu’s position as China’s leading Quora-like Q&A service. So Yunyun must achieve: 1 + 1 > 2.

Who’s up to this challenge? The founders are all ex-Googlers (China and US). The CEO is Jun Liu, a former engineering director at Google. Jia Sheng is in charge of product, while other founders include Zheng Sun, Xinghua An, Liren Chen and Dong Wang, all former engineers at Google.

A last observation: the user interface is a work of beauty. It’s intuitive and understated, with a few strategic bursts of color, keeping the focus squarely on the content. Startups like Yunyun are quickly raising the bar for design in China.

Yunyun is still in closed beta, but sign-up now and you’ll be the first to be admitted as it opens up.