Tencent’s Online Maps Bring StreetView to China


Kelly Chan   |   September 1, 2021

KK MALL StreetView, from soso.com.

Article published on Asia Tech News For The World, by Steven Millward

“The Chinese search engine Soso.com has added a Google-esque ‘StreetView’ feature to its online maps. It launched over the weekend, and initially covers just three areas – the modern city of Shenzhen; the ancient Tibetan capital, Lhasa (pictured above); and one scenic mountain region. More cities in China are being visited by Soso’s StreetView camera cars, and will go online in due course.

Splendid China StreetView
Window of the World StreetView
Huaqiang Bei StreetView
Shenzhen University StreetView

Soso is run by social media giant Tencent (HKG:0700), and so this very expensive new feature – which market leader Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) doesn’t have – shows that Tencent is taking its search engine and complementary parts very seriously. Indeed, we saw earlier this month that Soso had surpassed Google to become China’s second most popular search engine.”

More about soso.com StreetView.