Qihoo To Focus on Search-Based Q & A Service
Qihoo, founded by Zhou Hongyi, former CEO of Yahoo China, is well known for its user generated content search and aggregation service, mainly BBS and blog search.
It recently made a big change to its strategy.
Qihoo used to aggregate posts from various BBS forum and blogs into a Sina-like content portal. All these content have been moved to another site called Qikoo.com, which will be the successor of Qihoo’s content aggregation business. What about Qihoo.com？ It has become a Q&A service, called itself “the biggest Q&A website in China”.
You may think why Qihoo claims it a bigger Q&A site than Baidu Zhidao. Actually, Qihoo’s Q&A service is not a pure Q&A service, it is a search-based new service. Qihoo believes that there are useful knowledge scattered in numerous BBS forums in China, many questions have been answered in BBS already. So when you ask a question, Qihoo will use its BBS search engine to find possible answers from various BBS. If you failed to find satisfactory answers, you can still ask this question in Qihoo and wait for other users to answer it.
However, it is really not easy to implement this idea. Several cutting-edge technologies, such as natural language processing and semantic web, are involved, if you want to work out satisfactory answers. Based on my rough tests, the service is not bad, but still a long way ahead. On the other hand, millions of people go to Baidu Zhidao to seek help every day, how to build a community to compete with that of Baidu is another big challenge.
At the same time, 360Safe, an anti-malware security software by Qihoo, also launched a new domain name 360.cn. It is very likely that 360Safe will be spun off from Qihoo to develop separately. Sohu IT also reported that Qihoo secured another round of funding about $10 million for 360Safe. In 2006, Qihoo has raised two rounds of funding of about $50 million from several top-tier VCs, including Sequoia Capital, Highland Capital, Matrix Partners, Redpoint Ventures.
Written by Tangos on March 7, 2008 (Disclaimer: Qihoo was her ex-employer.)
