Sogou's name means "search dog," and its most loved product was the one people typed with. The Beijing company ran the second largest search engine in China by mobile queries, according to iResearch. Its Sogou Input Method turned typed pinyin into Chinese characters on phones and computers. When it filed in 2017, Sogou was a child of the portal Sohu, with Tencent as a major owner, and it was chasing Baidu in the toughest race on the Chinese internet.

Sohu's Spinoff, Tencent's Partner

Sogou began in 2004 as the search engine inside Sohu, one of China's first big web portals. Tencent invested in 2013 and folded its own search service, Soso, into Sogou. That deal put Sogou search inside Tencent's apps, the busiest doors on the Chinese internet. The company also bet on artificial intelligence, from voice typing to machine translation. After the IPO, Sohu, Tencent and management together held about 97.1 percent of the votes.

Thirteen Dollars, Then Tencent

Sogou priced at $13 per ADS and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on November 9, 2017, under the symbol SOGO. The offering raised about $585 million. The shares soon slid well below the offer price. In July 2020 Tencent proposed to buy the rest of the company for $9 per ADS. The deal, valued at about $3.5 billion, closed in September 2021, and Sogou became a wholly owned unit of Tencent.

Cover: Landscape with Dog, Thomas Doughty. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a dog in a landscape (the 'search dog').