360 Changes Search Brand to Haosou
China's 360 search engine has rebranded its search tool to Haosou, opening up partnerships with competing search engines including Alibaba and Google.
From early January 2015, Chinese search engine 360 (so.com) has changed its name to Haosou (haosou.com). 360 is China’s second largest search engine, with more than 29 percent search market share, according to a CNZZ August 2014 survey – quite an achievement given www.so.com was only launched in September 2012.
Other milestones associated with 360’s search tool include it capturing almost 10 percent of the Chinese search market share one month prior to its official launch. The appeal of that first version of 360’s search tool to SEO professionals was its simplicity and the strength of one basic function: webmasters could submit their websites’ sitemaps into the 360 search.
In China, 360 has also long been associated with 360’s antivirus software and has been very popular among local Chinese PC users. Now Haosou is a standalone search engine brand. In Chinese, Haosou’s literal translation is “good search” with 360’s objective to “do good.”
Now when you go to www.so.com, you will first see the old 360 search logo:
Then you will see the logo switch to this:
Finally, you will see the new rebranded Haosou search logo:
Aside from Web searches, the vertical searches including: news, answers, videos, images, music, baike (China’s version of Wiki), health, maps, shopping, mobile, and software, have all been moved under the new domain haosou.com.
360 claims the rebrand now gives users:
- More opportunities for exposure in the search engine results pages will be available to small-to-medium sized local websites.
- All websites will be governed through official search engine webmaster tools. This should benefit all websites which run legitimate businesses.
- Illegal ways of tricking users to gain search engine ranking will be more easily identified.
- Search engine advertising for the medical and hospital-related sectors will be largely reduced.
- This opens up partnerships with other competing search engines. For example, Haosou can have ad and/or search result syndication with Alibaba’s product search engine etao.com, and Google.com.hk. For paid search advertising on haosou.com, 360 also provides a platform – Dianjing (e.360.cn).
