Coc Coc Aims To Become Vietnam’s Bing

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Coc Coc, Vietnam’s homegrown search engine, has spent nearly a decade competing against Google. While other local competitors have disappeared, Coc Coc has secured the second spot in Vietnam’s search engine rankings and ranks third for browsers, trailing only Chrome and Safari.

Founded in 2013 by Russian and Vietnamese engineers, including Russian entrepreneur Victor Lavrenko, Coc Coc set out to provide a more localized search experience. The name, meaning “knock knock” in Vietnamese, reflects its goal of being a user-friendly and distinctly local alternative to Google.

Despite its success, the company has faced challenges. Lavrenko, who served as CEO until 2018, has accused Coc Coc of unethical practices—a claim the company denies. This legal dispute has added tension to Coc Coc’s journey as it works to solidify its market position.

Unlike China’s Baidu, which benefited from Google’s absence, Coc Coc has had to compete directly with the tech giant. Its localized features, such as handling Vietnamese diacritics and providing culturally relevant search results, have been key to its survival.

The company has also been quietly advancing its offerings. Recent product launches, including AI-driven tools like Coc Coc AI Chat and Coc Coc AI Search, demonstrate its ambition to innovate. These tools aim to enhance user experiences by providing faster and more relevant search results, with an emphasis on Vietnamese language support.

Coc Coc’s trajectory mirrors Microsoft Bing’s position in global markets as a viable alternative to Google. By continuing to focus on localization and advanced technologies, the company is positioning itself as Vietnam’s Bing.

While Coc Coc faces tough competition and occasional controversy, its resilience underscores its unique value in Vietnam’s digital landscape.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor