Last week, Taobao, the largest personal online trading platform in China, the second biggest subsidiary of Alibaba (HKG:1688), has launched a standalone search engine with a subdomain search.taobao.com.

taobao's search engine

As a large trading platform, Taobao manages tons of information of products.  As a open platform, Taobao has a strong desire to label all e-commerce websites “powered by Taobao”. Actually, this is the blueprint that called “Big Taobao”.

Thus, a search engine for “Big Taobao” is required.

However, this new search engine is no more than a alpha version. For one thing, the domain “search.taobao.com” is quite funny: the first section is a English word “search”, but the second section is pinyin “taobao”. This is really hard for those primary users in China. For the other thing, taobao’s lack of tech hurts the result. “Taobao’s search even don’t know word segmentation”,  said a Baidu’s Senior Engineer.