Okay so the title might be a little exaggerated but Qihoo sure did its job. The other day my mother asked me to find a particular Chinese song for an upcoming performance. This song was in no way considered current pop culture thus unlikely to be found on any Chinese torrent sites, not that I know of such sites anyway. I was also unwilling to install any other p2p program that might package some unwanted spy and ad-ware so instead I scoured the Internet, just like back in the day when the infrastructure for sharing files was in its infancy and you had to find publicly listed FTP sites or download links. For the most part, I was unsuccessful. There were hardly any FTP sites and most download links were broken. I was about to give up when I stumbled on Qihoo.
Qihoo is a search engine in China that seems to be gaining quite the foothold and attention. After doing a little digging, I found out that Qihoo is led by former President of Yahoo! China and has also secured $25 million in their second round of funding from several U.S. investors including Sequoia Capital, IDG Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures. Anyway, like most search engines Qihoo has several categories you can search under but what is unique is that it has a mp3 category. After running my search, it returned me a huge list of download links where I might find the file complete with links to preview/stream, download, and indicators for file size, and speed of server. The discovered links were from all sorts of websites and even some links pointed to a government server (illegally hosted I suspect)! What's also impressive is that some of the filenames were ambiguous such that the title, singer and author of the song had to be determined from the text around the file or right from the file's header, which Qihoo did very well. Their advance search also included the ability to search for song lyrics or other formats such as rm, wma, flash or all media formats. I suspect if a search engine tried to pull this off in the states, they would find themselves under a pile of lawsuits. Clearly, China still has a long way to go in the fight against piracy.