BEIJING, Mar 28, 2008 – Beijing-based living information search engine Kooxoo announced its cooperation with Priceline.com, a leading global online travel service provider based in the US, on March 26, 2008.
The announcement said that Kooxoo.com became the US Web site’s only online franchiser in China. Through it, netizens in the country can obtain all the information provided by Priceline, thanks to a full connection of the two sites’ database interfaces. Besides, Kooxoo said that it would launch a Chinese language service coordination section to facilitate the services of foreign hotel operators and travel agencies in the country.
Priceline has long been attracted by China, a market with the world’s biggest number of potential consumers, a Priceline executive said, and the cooperation will help his company get further informed of it and in the meantime, serve its consumers. The cooperation will bring the country’s online travel service onto a higher level, given Priceline’s information about the world’s high-quality hotels and Kooxoo’s vertical search, said the Kooxoo CEO Chen Hua confidently.
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March 30th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Kooxoo.. not easy to spell..add one more my searchengine, thank you
August 7th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
As I am interested in search engine technology myself, I’ve been following kooxoo.com for a long long time. Dating back when they are started. They recently bought a new domain kuxun.com so they can better target the Chinese audience.
Kooxoo initially started as a train ticket search service, and became very popular due to a lot of people looking for tickets online during busy holiday seasons in China. However, that hasn’t generated any revenue other than just spikes of traffic.
They then realized that it would not take them anywhere in terms of revenue, so they started to do search services for other market/segments. For example, rental/housing, jobs, etc. However, due to the entrenched players in those fields, they couldn’t really make a dent.
I guess in hide sight, it is due to the problem of their pure search approach. Doing vertical search is more than just a search service. They need to be really good at vertical market/domain knowledge.
I used to be thinking doing a vertical search for a specific field/area, but then found out more difficulty with that. So haven’t really done that. Instead, I think a content driven search based service like a Yahoo answers would be more viable as a new type of search engine. So, I did a bilingual Chinese/English question and answer site, http://www.JiansNet.com for the overseas Chinese community. I think in some sense, good content plus search, seems to be a more solid business model.