After months of silence about any considerable new developments, Chinese portal website Sohu.com (SOHU) says it has launched Sogou 3.0, a new product upgrade version for its proprietary Internet search engine, Sogou.

Charles Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sohu.com, says, "With the rapid growth of the Internet in China, information today is increasing at an explosive speed. Library size, updating speed and relevancy have become key metrics in measuring the success of a search engine. With the launch of Sogou 3.0, we are confident that we have vastly improved in all these areas. We have continued to reinvest in research and development and believe that commitment to our search product is making Sogou the search engine of choice for Chinese users."

Since Sogou's initial launch on August 2004, the company says it has successfully launched three upgraded versions, Sogou 2.0, 2.5 and now 3.0, which resulted in improved search capabilities by expanding Sogou's database capacity, increasing the speed for updating and listing higher relevancy search results.

Through increased server utilization and upgraded crawling, analyzing, indexing, and anti-dead link functions, the newly upgraded Sogou claims to be the first search engine to reach a database of 10 billion retrieved Chinese language pages.