On September 30th 2008, Tinhvan Media, a company of Tinhvan Group officially launched its search service dubbed Xalo (meaning Highway). After more than six months of testing, users now can search Vietnamese with seven main search features: Web, Image, News, Blog, Forum, Music and Classified. This VC backed search service plans to surpass other Vietnamese search services with target of more than 30% of search market in 2010. This number could translate into a big competitor to the incumbent Google search and leave Yahoo in the dust. It sounds like a mission impossible but they hope a peer of Baidu, Naver, Yandex for Vietnam . A pay per click system similar to Google AdWords should be in action late this year. Congratulations to Xalo! We hope search advertising would be a dispensable tool for local marketers.

Technorati Tags: Baidu, Google, Naver, Xalo, Yandex