Dan Taylor

Founder & Editor

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.

Baidu World 2026: The Model Built for Baidu Search Is Now an API, and ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview Promises Apache 2.0 Weights on 25 November

Baidu World 2026 opened in Beijing this morning, and if you were waiting for a big Baidu Search moment you’ll be disappointed. Search itself got no headline launch. The model that has been doing Baidu Search’s heavy reasoning, though, has ...

Yandex Writes Off 2.84% of Cloud Customer Data After the Data-Centre Attacks — and Turns Backups On by Default

Yandex has finally given a number for what the October data-centre attacks permanently destroyed. In a statement on 10 November, the company said its engineers have restored access to 97.16% of customer data in Yandex Cloud. The remaining 2.84% cannot ...

Qwen4-Max Lands in Preview — on Alibaba’s Token Plan, With No Model Card and a 25 November Deadline

“Next week” turned out to mean two weeks. On 11 November Alibaba’s Qwen team posted that Qwen4-Max is now in preview, five days after the “The becoming begins” Zhuangzi teaser we wrote about yesterday. The post went up at 10:01 ...

Tencent Makes Yuanbao Search Official: 157 Authoritative Sources, QQ Browser Default Option and Ads You Can Fold Away

It’s official now. A day after we reported that Tencent had quietly opened Yuanbao Search at so.qq.com, Tencent Cloud announced on 11 November that 元宝搜索 (Yuanbao Search) has “officially launched”, IT之家 reports. Two things are new. The launch now has ...

Yahoo Scout Exits Beta and Takes Over Yahoo Search: ‘Pivot Search’ Lets Users Flip Between AI Answers and Blue Links — Including in the UK and Europe

Yahoo has taken the “beta” label off Scout and made it the engine behind Yahoo Search itself. In its announcement on 10 November, Yahoo said Scout has delivered more than 3 billion answers since it launched in Q1 2026. It ...

Baidu Lets Brands Sign Their Search Widgets — and Says Ten Days of Index Volume Data Are Worthless

Baidu’s Search Resource Platform has published two notices in the past fortnight that tell you where its attention is going. On 6 November it upgraded the brand rules for Search Widgets (搜索小工具), so developers can now put commercial brand names ...

Qwen4’s ‘Next Week’ Has Come and Gone: Alibaba Posts a Zhuangzi Fish Instead of a Model

When Alibaba Cloud’s chief technology officer told the Amsterdam Apsara Conference on 29 October that Qwen4 was coming “next week”, at least according to an attendee quoted by FelloAI, the search and AI crowd marked their calendars for 2 to ...

Naver Blog Supplies 46% of Cited Sources in Korean AI Answers, per GenRank — and Reviewer Campaigns Now Pick Bloggers by AI Briefing Citations

If you want to know where Korean-language AI answers get their sources, the latest numbers point overwhelmingly to Naver. AEO/GEO start-up Acrosse (어크로스) has rebuilt the Korean edition of its GenRank AI visibility index. In the 1 November edition, 46.0% ...

Yandex Forum Recap: First Text Update in a Month Lands on 7 November, but Commercial Sites Were Still Frozen in Early October

For the first time since the October data-centre attacks, at least one of Russia’s update trackers has logged a Yandex text update. Promosite’s update analyser recorded one on 7 November at 14:55 (its own timestamp), with the index rolled out ...

Tencent Quietly Opens Yuanbao Search at so.qq.com — and Sogou Keyword Searches Now Land There

Three days after we reported that Tencent was reportedly preparing a consumer AI search engine, it seems to have gone live. Nobody held a keynote. Tencent’s Yuanbao Search now has a standalone PC web entry at so.qq.com, and several Chinese ...