Tencent opens Yuanbao AI search on the web, including WeChat posts

Tencent announced the public launch of its standalone Yuanbao Search website on November 11, giving users a browser-based way to search the public web, articles from WeChat Official Accounts, videos from WeChat Channels, Tencent News and academic literature. The company says the service cites sources in its results and lets users ask follow-up questions after an AI-generated summary.

The public site is at so.qq.com. The latest version of QQ Browser can also use Yuanbao as its search engine, according to the official Yuanbao account, which listed support for both desktop and mobile versions of the browser. Selecting it in QQ Browser makes it available from the address bar. That gives people a dedicated search page alongside the search features Tencent already offers in its Yuanbao assistant.

AI Ping checked the public landing page on November 12 UTC. It displayed a box for keywords or questions, voice and image inputs, an AI mode and a separate academic section. Tencent says the service can summarize retrieved material and present cards or charts where relevant. Its AI mode keeps follow-up questions in the same search conversation. The page also displays a drop area for attaching an image file to a question.

WeChat posts and academic papers in the results

WeChat Official Accounts are publishing channels used by organizations, media outlets and other creators. WeChat Channels is a separate venue for video. Sogou opened a route to WeChat account posts from its desktop and mobile search in 2014, according to a filing from its then-parent Sohu. Yuanbao Search also draws on WeChat videos and uses AI to bring material from different sources into one answer. Tencent says it applies Yuanbao's large language model to interpreting questions, retrieving and ranking material, and assembling answers.

The company highlighted 157 sources that it classifies as authoritative. It says its results give priority to official and other authoritative sources and identify where material came from. Tencent describes the wider web index as being on the order of 100 billion entries. An index is the catalogue a search engine draws on to find material for a query.

The academic section presents research findings in simpler language and points back to original sources. Tencent also describes translation for English-language titles and abstracts. Readers can follow the source link to the original paper, where the publisher or repository sets the terms for full-text access.

Paid listings get their own collapsible section

Tencent says sponsored listings appear in a dedicated section labeled “Related Ads,” with a control that collapses the entire section. The public homepage also links to Tencent's advertiser site. The product announcement describes how advertising is marked when it appears. It gives no expected frequency or number of ads per search.

Li Ruizhang, who leads the web product, told technology outlet Zhidx that the team aims to distinguish ads clearly, let users collapse them and improve how closely they relate to a query. Li separately told 36Kr that the service selects ads and organic results through separate processes. He said the team intends to keep paid listings from influencing which organic results appear or how they are ranked.

Tencent was already using the Yuanbao Search name for a developer product. An October 9 change log records the renaming of Tencent Cloud's Web Search API. Tencent opened its search capabilities to companies and developers later in October. The developer service returns structured information, including results and ranking data, for use in other applications.

Tencent Cloud lists a price of 14 yuan per 1,000 requests for its entry-level developer search product. That price applies to API calls through the cloud service. The consumer site displays results, summaries and sources in a browser, and Tencent's launch announcement lists no separate price for using it.