Some of China’s leading news organizations on Friday launched Chinaso.com, a new Chinese-language Internet search engine.
Operated by ChinaSo IT Corporation the new search engine is founded by China’s seven main news organizations including People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, Guangming Daily, Economic Daily, China Daily and China New Service.
Reports coming from Xinhua News Agency suggest that the new engine will allow users to search for articles from the country’s newspapers and magazines. Its service covers a huge range of topics ranging from news, website, pictures, videos, maps and website navigation, with 16 channels ranging from economy to sports and applications for mobile users.
According to a Global times report Chinaso.com is a consolidation of People’s Daily’s Jike.com launched in 2010 and Xinhua’s Panguso.com launched in 2011.
Analysts expect China’s search engine market to continue to heat up with the number of Internet users recorded to be around 618 million last year. A rapid increase in mobile search engine users is also expected.
According to data from Internet analyst iResearch Consulting Group, Baidu, one of China’s leading search engine, accounted for 81.4 percent of the market share while Google’s market share in the third quarter of 2013 accounted for only 12.3 percent.
Launched in 2012, Qihoo 360’s search engine market share increased to 1.6 percent.
‘So’ in ChinaSo’s context means search. The search engine’s logo with multicolor-pattern resembles Google’s logo.
