Youdao is a search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 released by Chinese internet leviathan, NetEase

NetEase

NetEase is a Chinese internet company that operates 163.com, a popular web portal which received over 546 million page views in June of 2005. The company has grown rapidly since its founding in June 1997, thanks in part to its investment in search engine technology and massively multiplayer...

 (網易) in 2007. It is the featured search engine of its parent company's web portal, 163.com, and lets users search for web pages, images, news, music, blogs, Chinese-to-English dictionary entries, and more.

Youdao hopes to compete with the likes of Google search

Google search

Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....

, SoGou

Sogou

Sogou.com is a Chinese search engine which can search text, images, music, and maps. It was launched 4 August 2004 and is owned by Sohu, Inc.. As of April 2010, it has a rank of 121 in Alexa's internet rankings. Sogou provides an index of up to 10 billion web pages. Its major domestic competitor...

 (Chinese: 搜狗; pinyin: SōuGǒu), and Baidu

Baidu

Baidu, Inc. , simply known as Baidu and incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese web services company headquartered in the Baidu Campus in Haidian District, Beijing, People's Republic of China....

(Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù) within five years.

The user-agent string of Youdao spider is named YodaoBot or YoudaoBot.