Weibo, previously known as Sina Weibo, has 550 million monthly active users in March 2020, remaining one of the top social media platforms in China. For businesses and brands, Weibo search engine could be very useful to identify valuable customer and market insights.
Let’s take a look at a few ways to search Weibo platform in real-time.
Weibo Search Function
On Weibo platforms like Sina Weibo, you can conduct a search on any page or go to a search page such as s.weibo.com.
You can bookmark the search result page or “follow” the topic you searched for to create shortcuts. It’s nice and easy.
Update (25 August 2020): the feature to “follow” a topic on Weibo is no longer available. Users on Weibo can filter the search results to users, articles, videos, images, and topics.
Search Weibo with Panguso
Launched this February, Panguso is joint efforts by China Mobile and Xinhua News Agency.
Update (25 August 2020): On March 1, 2014, Panguso merged with Jike and became ChinaSo. And, the Weibo search function is no longer available.
Real-time Search with Tencent SoSo
Similar to Panguso real-time search, the results on SoSo search are also auto refreshed and include also microblog content.
Update (25 August 2020): Soso discontinued services and now redirects to Sogou Search. Sogou can’t be used to search Weibo but it can be used to search WeChat.
Real-time Search with Youdao
Youdao is NetEase’s effort in Chinese search market. It’s the first search engine that launched real-time search feature and also my favorite real-time search engine.
Update (25 August 2020): Youdao search discontinued though it still exists and focuses on the language-translation tool and services.
Weibo Search on China Search
China Search, or Zhongsou, just launched Weibo search in November this year.
I like Youdao for real-time search because Youdao’s real-time search indexes not only microblogs but also forums and news. It’s a great tool, simple and free, for marketers to monitor the online conversation.
Update (March 2, 2012): Baidu yesterday announced the integration of Weibo results including Sina Weibo into Baidu SERPs. You can visit our Facebook Page for screen capture.
Update (25 August 2020): Baidu desktop search doesn’t return any results from Weibo. But on mobile, on either browser or Baidu App, it shows a filtered channel specifically for Weibo search results:
If you’d like to monitor Weibo search results, you need more powerful tools. There are currently no free ones in the market and it usually costs about US$3,000-US$7,000 per year.
