Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) already has a search engine and Alibaba already has a product search engine, so it makes sense for the two to work together. And that’s what they’re doing.
The tie-up between the two Chinese web giants effectively gives Qihoo a new shopping search option on its 360 Search site, which exploded onto the scene in China last summer. Thanks to Qihoo’s huge traffic from its established web browsers and web portal, Qihoo’s 360 Search instantly became China’s second largest search engine last year.
Basically, it looks to be just Alibaba’s existing eTao shopping search ported over to Qihoo’s site. That’s even evident in the URL 360.etao.com. So it’s not fundamentally new. But it means that Qihoo’s originally spartan search offerings (initially it had just ‘news’, ‘web’ and ‘video’) have now expanded to 11 options.
This partnership gives Qihoo access to everything on eTao, which is perhaps China’s most comprehensive product search engine. Though Alibaba itself has numerous e-commerce companies, eTao indexes content from nearly all of China’s e-stores, not just Alibaba’s own properties. It also gives Qihoo a big boost relative to its nemesis Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), which arrived alarmingly late to to this shopping search battle, only launching its own dedicated portal in February this year. ETao and other such sites have been running for years.
For Alibaba, this should be a big shot in the arm for eTao’s traffic and visibility.
Price comparison and shopping search sites are a big battleground in China, covering numerous startups and some other major web portal companies as well. Last year the startup site B5M raised over $7 million in series A funding to grow its own product.
(Hat-tip to Sina Tech (article in Chinese) for spotting this)
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