Huawei’s self-developed search engine “Petal Search” went live quietly. Just three days ago I wrote “Huawei Mobile Search’s AspiegelBot Crawler Found Scraping at High Frequency — Possibly Because Google Services Can’t Be Used” and guessed Huawei would build its own search engine. Now it has indeed happened: Huawei’s self-developed search engine went live quietly, named: Petal Search.
Due to the US ban, Huawei can no longer use Google-provided services. Huawei is working to complete its own app ecosystem using HMS. To fill the gap in search engines, Huawei launched the “Petal Search” search app today, mainly aimed at mobile clients, and seen as a replacement for Google Search.
According to the HUAWEI AppGallery app page description: “Petal Search, enjoy every moment of your life. Petal Search puts the world in the palm of your hand. Use our advanced technology to search your favorite apps for your phone.”
Petal Search can provide users with the following functions: app recommendations and search, daily weather forecasts and hot news, instant sports scores and schedules, video, image, and music search, financial news and stock market updates, security protection, searching and booking rooms at millions of hotels worldwide, querying flight and travel info for top global destinations, and looking up local services and businesses via a comprehensive catalog, and more. From these functions it’s clear this isn’t a Google Search wearing the HUAWEI name — it’s more like a localized global search engine that can reach websites worldwide.
The industry says the Huawei search app is seen as part of the HUAWEI HMS ecosystem. This listing on the App Gallery app store supports HUAWEI and Honor devices and is expected to replace Google’s apps. HUAWEI HMS already supports over 170 countries with up to 400 million monthly active users.