Qihoo, Unsurprisingly,Launches A Separate Medical & Health Search Service

Qihoo 360 rolls out a new vertical search service, named Liang Yi (Good doctors in Chinese), for medical and health information. It has indexed 150 million webpages from 114 legitimate healthcare websites and 1716 official websites of hospitals’, according to Qi Xiangdong, president of Qihoo.

Its default page, like the start-up page Qihoo runs, features keywords of diseases and healthcare websites. Clicking on a keyword, you’d be led to a sub-page where you can see information about the disease, hospitals and doctors that specialize in it — there are buttons that would direct you to the websites where you can make online reservations,  and lastly search results.

Users can see the rating of each search result — from Qihoo’s website rating service, to the right. Qihoo said that they would stop indexing a website if the rating of it became too low.

Qihoo has been criticizing Baidu, its alleged competitor, for letting go of medical scam ads mixed in organic search results and claimed to offer medical information provided by China’s State Food and Drug Administration by partnering with Jike.com. Qihoo made it clear that they’d not feature medical & health ads on its so.com in order to grab the traffic from that on Baidu which reportedly accounts for 30% of Baidu’s advertising revenue. To respond, Baidu later announced to partner with Chinese authorities to offer verified legitimate medical information in search results.

At the press conference jointly held by Qihoo and Jike.com,  Qihoo Qi Xiangdong said that So.com, launched as recently as last August, was aimed at 20% of China’s search market share this year and 40% in 2015.