Qihoo 360 Fights Back, Banishes “Co-operation” with Baidu

And the battle rages on… Last night, Baidu redirected all its products’ webpages searched from Qihoo 360’s search engine to its front page. And now just hours ago, 360 Search retaliated by switching all links on its top navigation bar from four that were Baidu’s related products to those of other rivals. More a marriage of convenience (for Qihoo, being a newcomer to search) than a formal “co-operation,” it has nonetheless come to an end as the acrimony between Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) escalates.

We can confirm that the following four elements of the 360 Search top bar led to Baidu features up until last night, as can be verified on our post from last week. Here are the four changes in redirects today:

• News now goes to News.so.360.cn
• MP3 goes to Mp3.sogou.com
• Maps goes to Google Maps
• Answers goes to qihoo.com/wenda

Here’s our illustration of the changes:

Click to enlarge!

So now Baidu is totally being ignored by Qihoo 360! Normal searches on 360 Search still work fine for us as it currently still directs you to Baidu’s products if you actually search for those products. We wonder if Qihoo is frantically working on its own MP3 music portal (which would be easy), and its own mapping service (which would be a massive challenge), so that it doesn’t have to rely on any search rivals.

Expect this search war to continue to get bloodier.

[UPDATED: Added a refreshed image and improved the first paragraph shortly after publishing]

[Source: Our friends over at Techweb]