Qihoo360 Mobile Search Taking Shape Quietly
Qihoo360’s chairman and CEO Zhou Hongyi once put it, “a strong mobile search engine is the premise of everything, from speech recognition to map, and it can give a heavy blow to the traditional search engine.” He may be trying to get at something by saying so. And here’s what he got at: 360’s mobile search engine is gradually surfaced above the water.
360 mobile search went online recently at m.so.com, though it’s still in the ‘primitive state’ with functions limited to web search and news search. One 360 staff posted messages on Weibo disclosing that they were hard working on functions like mobile map and so on, but there’s no exact timetable for the launch date yet. Make sense, just like Rome, map also couldn’t be built in a day.
From the day 36o mobile browser (iOS) defaults search engine to 360 on, people are speculating that Zhou is firing up another shot at Baidu, took the fight with Baidu from desktop front to mobile front.
According to people close to the company, 360 hasn’t set up a dedicated and professional mobile search team yet.
Deep rooted in China’s internet business via security services, 360 now sets foot on mobile market, which hasn’t been totally dominated by anyone yet. As more and more giants now plateaued business and had to seek out new opportunities to keep growing, just get your seat belt fastened and get ready for an excellent show in China’s mobile Internet arena.