Taobao's Search Engines, Designed for E-Commerce

If you look into the landscape of Chinese social media, you may realize that in each sector of Chinese web, portal, video-sharing, e-commerce, social networks etc usually has more than one big local players. For portals, you have Sina, QQ.com, 163, Sohu as top 4, for video sites you have Youku, Tudou, Ku6 and so on. There is only one exception, which is Search. Baidu is no doubt the dominator of the search market. However, Baidu has its weakness. For example, you may find that on Baidu, it’s hard to search for the important information (price, where to buy etc) about a product that you want to buy, at least it usually gives you little information about whether you can buy it on Taobao.

Taobao is leading e-commerce site in China, so obviously it has its own ideas about search. In fact it has started testing the water.

Four search services have been launched recently: Taobao Search, eTao, TaotaoSou and the very latest one TuXiang which was quietly launched yesterday.

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