For Chinese people working in IT industry, Qihoo is an awful company for the reasons mentioned above, but also for allegedly assisting government Internet censorship.

Now let's make their awful name worldwide. ;)

Like it or not, they do have a crack team of engineers. 90%+ of the Windows kernel hackers in China have worked, or still is with Qihoo.

Source?

This is pretty anecdotal and I doubt there will be a list of names written down somewhere. However have a look at the number of acknowledgements in Microsoft's security bulletins from last year:

Palo Alto Networks - 34

Qihoo/360 - 27

FireEye - 14

Tencent - 14

Trend Micro - 12

Fortinet - 7

McAfee - 2

VMware - 2

Kaspersky - 1

They are a pretty unsavory company but they really know what they are doing.

Source: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/dn903755.aspx

>>> They are a pretty unsavory company but they really know what they are doing.

And therein lies the problem... no?

The problem is that, more often than not when something related to Qihoo gets posted on HN the replies were invariably about how evil Qihoo is as a company. The discussion quickly becomes derailed and meaningless as the choir busily preach its own members.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9840824

Can we please judge each topic on its own context without the ad hominem?

Even as a Chinese company, where the regulation is none and government involvement is normal, Qihoo is just EXCEPTIONAL.

It has absolutely no respect to user privacy, and will not hesitate to threaten users into their favor, if that doesn't work, hijack your computer.

Shameless, no bottomline......it is worst of the worse.

Mark my words. DONT EVER TRUST IT.

I've worked with a company that at least 30% of our user base uses Qihoo brower. They blocked few of our domains and now, someone from Qihoo asked us to pay so that they will unblock our domains.

What's is their reason to block yours domains? They can't do that for no reason, right?

They do have a reason :) But paying them to remove our domains in the blacklist is a different issue.

congrats on making item 11111111

What do you mean by "blocked few of our domains"?

I imagine Qihoo has a department like Barracuda. Enterprise Firewalls, you know?

Would like to add Baidu isn't better, too.

Example, try search proprietary software, say 'Autocad', first few results are always pirate sites, while google will show the Autodesk site and the wikipedia post.

Recently Baidu also under the spotlight for monetizing illness-related forums[1]. The issue is some patients accused the Internet giant selling their private info to _unqualified_ private hospitals. These hospitals charge a lot but usually their hardware and staff are underqualified.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-01/12/content_230...

I imagine google is showing a global popularity vs popularity in China. A good search engine shows first the results that most people are really looking for...

What happens if that was your software? Will you think it is good? Hope whatever you have for a living is NOT up there for free due to 'popular demand'.

Exactly. This is actually an example of Baidu having objectively better results.

Wow. You weren't kidding!

Unless this[0] is the Autocad office in China (which I highly doubt), there's absolutely no link to the Autodesk website on the first result page.

In fact, their instant answer when you search for Autocad is downloadable version of Autocad for Win/Mac/iOS. I don't have a Win/Mac computer with me at the moment, so I can't verify are those legit trial versions or pirated ones, but the iOS one points to the legit version on Apple's store.

[0] http://www.autodesk.com.cn/

They also used to bundle a cracked version of Sandboxie in their own browser for sandboxing.