Could Qihoo and Netease’s Search Partnership Turn Into Something More?

On Friday afternoon, Qihoo 360 announced a partnership with Netease that will see the former providing technology for the latter’s Youdao search engine. If you haven’t heard of Youdao, you’re not missing anything; it’s a very minor player in China’s search engine market and the fact that this partnership was announced on a Friday afternoon is testament to the fact that even the companies themselves don’t think this news is all that exciting.

On its face, it isn’t. The move makes sense for Youdao, which has been struggling to develop its own technology since ending a partnership with Google, but even with Qihoo technology, Youdao is not about to set the China search world on fire.

I think, however, that the fact that these two companies are cooperating all is quite interesting, even if this specific product isn’t. This year we’ve seen increasingly large partnerships between China’s major Internet companies as sides are drawn up in what’s likely to be a battle over huge markets like e-commerce, search, video, and gaming. Netease has virtually nothing to offer Qihoo in terms of search, but if the companies are working together on this, it could open the door to future partnerships in more lucrative fields.

In particular, Netease operates extremely popular portal sites that aggregate news and support massive communities of readers and commenters. There are almost certainly ways that these portals could be integrated into Qihoo’s search results that would be mutually beneficial. Another area of potential cooperation is gaming; Qihoo doesn’t develop games but it does already offer app platforms that help distribute games, and Netease operates some of China’s most popular titles, so the potential for a partnership is there.

Ultimately I have no idea if the two companies are working on more than just search. But Netease is one of the few major web companies that doesn’t seem to have found an ally yet, and with even the giants like Alibaba partnering up, it might make sense for the company to look at Qihoo as more than just a search technology provider.