According to chinainternetwatch.com, Qihoo 360 has taken a shorter brand and made it longer, launching its new search brand Haosou.com and re-directing the traffic from its previous search engine domain So.com to Haosou.com.
“360 changed its search engine brand name and its logo trying to help users easily remember and understand.
One insider believed that Haosou is more applicable in mobile internet market and Haosou could be sub-brand of Qihoo 360 which can make it an independent search brand.
Qi Xiangdong also said that Haosou.com can provide more opportunities for 360 search business, which made 360 search business adapt to mobile internet’s development.”
“Sou” in Chinese means search while “Hao” means good; Haosou brand’s own explanation is that, it’s a good search engine and does not do bad.”
You can read the whole story here
According to HaoSou.com’s explanation on its site, the reason to choose the name Haosou(好搜) is 不做坏事！(Do No Evil!) Sounds familiar? http://www.haosou.com/zt/haosou.html?src=home-link
Maybe they could have rebranded into a Chinese dating site with the URL… So.com/DoYouComeHereOften 😛
so are they going to let so.com drop 🙂
Brian, when was it last time you have seen LL .com dropped? LL .tv, yes. But .com???
I like seeing more competition in the search engine space in China, as Baidu’s market share is just too high, higher than what Google has in the U.S. So, it is good that qihoo/360 keeps trying, that’s a good sign for a healthy competition in China!