Petal Search

» see petalsearch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In May 2019 the US Commerce Department put Huawei on the Entity List, and Google stopped licensing Google Mobile Services for new Huawei handsets. That is a sentence about trade policy, but on a phone it means something very concrete: no Play Store, and no search bar that returns anything. Huawei was still shipping tens of millions of Android devices a year. Every one of them needed something in the slot where Google used to be.

Petal Search was the answer, launched in early 2020 alongside Petal Maps and the AppGallery as part of Huawei Mobile Services. It started as an app-finder, a way to locate installable APKs across third-party stores now that the Play Store was gone, then expanded into general web search with its own crawler and its own results pages. By November 2021 Huawei claimed coverage of 170 countries and regions in 55 languages. It won an iF Design Award in 2022, which is the sort of accolade a product collects when the product itself is not the story.

The web search engine at petalsearch.com stopped working on 25 June 2023. There was no post, no notice, no wind-down page. Users noticed because queries stopped returning Petal's own results and started returning Bing's, and because the more specialized search features on the app simply went away. The app kept shipping on Huawei phones after that, still called Petal Search, still occupying the same slot, just no longer pretending to have its own index behind it.

~ the case file ~

~ the borrowed index ~

The awkward fact about Petal Search is that Microsoft was in it almost from the start. A significant share of the web results were delivered by Bing under a partnership, with Huawei's own crawler filling in local and app-layer coverage. So a project born from being cut off by one American company was running on infrastructure rented from another American company, which somewhat undercuts the sovereignty framing it got in the Chinese press.

That was probably the only sane engineering call available. Building a general web index that a consumer will accept costs billions and takes years, and Huawei was trying to keep an entire phone division alive on a deadline set by a foreign regulator. Renting the index and owning the interface gets you a shippable product in months. It also means that when the rental gets expensive, there is nothing underneath to fall back on.

~ who it was actually for ~

Huawei phones sold well in Turkey after 2019, sitting in the price band where people care a lot about the camera and not at all about which company signs the OS. I watched friends and colleagues buy them and then discover, a week in, what "no Google services" actually meant in daily use. Nobody I knew stayed on Petal Search voluntarily. They installed a browser, set the homepage to Google, and treated the preloaded search app as a thing to be routed around rather than used.

That is the structural problem with a default that exists because a competitor was removed. Petal Search never had to win a user, which means it never learned how, and the moment anyone had a way out they took it.

~ the quiet part ~

Nothing dramatic happened on 25 June 2023. A hostname stopped serving its own results and started proxying someone else's, and the only people who documented it were forum users comparing outputs. Huawei has never published a shutdown notice for the web engine, and the Petal Search brand still exists on HMS devices today as an app-and-local-results tool, which makes this a death that the company would dispute.

Call it what it was: the index died and the logo survived it. Petal Search is now the second thing Huawei built to replace Google that ended up being a wrapper around a competitor's work, and the more honest measure of the sanctions is not whether Huawei could ship a search engine. It shipped one in under a year. The measure is that three years later it was cheaper to stop.

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