Sohu's name means "search fox" in Chinese, a nod to Yahoo, the American directory it set out to match. Charles Zhang, a physicist trained at MIT, returned to Beijing and started the company in 1996, when few people in China had ever been online. Sohu launched a Chinese-language directory, then grew into a portal with news, email and chat. In July 2000 it went public on Nasdaq, one of the first Chinese internet companies to list in New York.

Yahoo, in Chinese

Zhang's bet was that China would come online fast and would want a home page built for it. Sohu started as a hand-sorted directory of Chinese websites and added news, free email, chat rooms and shopping links. It earned money by selling ads to companies that wanted to reach China's first wave of internet users. Its rivals Sina and Netease were making the same bet, and all three listed on Nasdaq in 2000.

Games, Search and Survival

Sohu priced its IPO at $13 a share in July 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as SOHU. The dot-com crash followed within months and the shares fell hard. Sohu survived by adding new lines of business. It built an online game studio, Changyou, and a search engine, Sogou, and later took both public on their own. Sohu remains listed on Nasdaq, with Zhang still in charge.

Cover: Fox, from The Picture Book of Realistic Paintings of Hokusai (Hokusai shashin gafu), Katsushika Hokusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a fox (Sohu means "search fox").