Back in May 2020, Huawei officially announced its proprietary search engine called Petal Search. The app was previously simply referred to as Huawei Search in Beta and was developed to replace Google Search within its Huawei Mobile Services ecosystem. Now, the Chinese tech giant has launched the search engine in Singapore.

For those interested, Petal Search is currently available for download in the region through the company’s AppGallery. Huawei has built its own mobile services and related application software after losing Google support back in 2019 since it was placed in the US Entity List. This list includes blacklisted companies, which cannot trade or buy goods and services from American based companies. Thus, the company lost Google’s support and shipped its smartphone with the vanilla Android.

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Over the course of a year, Huawei has since been building up its software ecosystem and expanding its AppGallery and Huawei Mobile Services as a whole. The Huawei Search has now finally appeared as a stable build of Petal Search and is currently available for download. This platform enables easier for users to find applications from third party sources and to download and run them.

At the moment, the complete functions of the new application may not yet be available in all countries right now. Although, Huawei is working on including additional regions soon. Petal Search can be downloaded by those smartphones that run the latest EMUI 10 version (v10.1.0.131). Currently, the app supports 40 languages and is available in 45 countries and regions.

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Huawei has been working on alternatives to Google apps and Google Mobile Services for a while now. It already launched Huawei Mobile Services and AppGallery, the latter being its own version of the Play Store. What Huawei does not have yet is a search app but its working on one already called Huawei Search and details of the app have surfaced on the web.

News of the Huawei Search App surfaced on the web thanks to a Redditor who revealed that the tech giant was recruiting users to test the Huawei Search app in the UAE. Max Weinbach of XDA Developers gave the app a spin and has provided images of what it looks like as well as details of its features.

The Huawei Search App has a discover section where it displays a news feed. It also has icons for Weather, Sports, Unit Converter, and a Calculator thus putting these tools at the fingertips of the user. You can change the search region or leave it at Global if you wish. There is also a Dark Mode and the option to turn Safe Search on. Huawei will also allow users to choose if they want their search history stored.

Huawei is aware that there are concerns about how it handles user data, so it will please users to know that the service is handled by Aspiegel Limited, a subsidiary of Huawei located in Ireland.

XDA Developers reports that they were not able to determine the search engine Huawei is using for its search app as the results do not match those of search engines such as Yandex, Ask, AOL, Yahoo, or Bing. So there is a probability it has its own search engine as the privacy statement for the app says users can even request to have a search result delisted.

The Huawei Search app still doesn’t compare to Google Search but more features will probably be added as time goes on.

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