VietNamNet Bridge – A lot of Vietnamese searching engines, namely xalo, monava,
and timnhanh, once stated that they would outstrip Google, but they finally died
young, or had to shift to other business.
However, Vietnamese have never given up the dream of “walking abreast” the
giants in the world in terms of technology development. Coc Coc has recently
released the dream of defeating Google.
Early blossomed, early faded
In 2006-2008, the Vietnamese Internet market witnessed the boom of the searching
websites with the existence of 20 products developed by domestic firms. Some of
the products were backed by powerful investment funds, which gave the developers
one more reason to believe that they would easily outstrip Google or Yahoo in
terms of the solutions for Vietnamese language.
VON was considered the pioneer in the searching engine movement in Vietnam, when
it launched timnhanh.com in 2006 and received the investment worth $2 million
from DFJ VinaCapital.
However, timnhanh.com has quietly left the searching website market, which is
now working as a portal which collects information from newspapers.
In late 2007, Vietnamese monava.vn made a noisy debut with the statement that it
would attract 2 million customers from Google. The searching engine got the
promise from Nguyen Hoang Group about the investment deal worth $500,000.
However, after the accusations that monava was just the searching website
re-using the results of Google, Nguyen Hoang Group in March 2008 stated it would
stop investing in monava. The domain name has got expired.
Xalo.vn and socbay.com were the two big names in the searching engine movement
which stated that they would directly confront Google when they made debut in
2008.
In the first operation period, both of them provided web searching options,
considering this the core service. At that moment, Tinh Van Company said it
spent $2 million on the beta version xalo.vn to compete with its main rival –
the giant Google.
The company also released its ambitious plan to develop xalo.vn into the
alternative choice for Google in some cases, especially for the searching in
Vietnamese. However, it has not fulfilled its hope.
Still nurturing the dream of defeating Google
Analysts once commented that Vietnamese searching engines could not find the
land for themselves, because Google merely dominated the searching website
market in Vietnam.
However, Vietnamese have never given up the dream of rivaling Google.
In April 2013, another searching website was launched at coccoc.com. Coc Coc
believes that it would outstrip Google like Yandex could outstrip Google in
Russia, Baidu outstrip Google in China, and Naver in South Korea. It said it has
a powerful financial capability and the technology engineers who won Google in
the above said markets.
In its press release, Coc Coc affirmed that it can provide the best service of
searching for locations in Vietnam with the database comprising of more than
500,000 locations in 171 cities and towns, and the number of indexes of the
“.vn” websites double than Google.
After making the investment of $15 million over the last 2 years, coccoc.com
plans to invest $100 million, or VND2 trillion to follow its ambitious plan.
In November 2012, a foreign social network was launched in Vietnam – wada.vn of
the Russian NHI JSC. At the debut, NHI said it invested VND200 billion in the
project.
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