Alibaba, now the biggest e-commerce company in China, allocated $50 million to Quixey in 2013 to help the Mountain View-based search company develop its technology.
The enhanced app searching service will allow users of YunOS, Alibaba's mobile operating system, to find apps by using information on what the users want to do, instead of using the familiar system of searching through keywords.
"Powering the future of mobile search for Alibaba, announced today," says Chief Executive Officer Tomer Kagan in a tweet.
Alibaba launched the YunOS mobile operating system in July 2011. The company hoped to encourage developers to create apps for the OS under a funding scheme worth 1 billion yuan ($163 million). Funding will be sourced through revenue sharing and other incentives.
There are at least five handset manufacturers in China that have adopted Alibaba's mobile OS. As part of the deal, the company would pay the mobile manufacturer the amount of 1 yuan per month ($0.16) for every mobile phone unit that they sell with the OS. This will go on for as long as the handset owner continues using the OS. Information on the deal is revealed on Alizila, a website operated by the Chinese e-commerce company.
Quixey, which makes a mobile app of the same name, offers users a search engine service that is unlike the ones already being used in the market. It is designed to help users find the most appropriate mobile apps that they need.
The partnership between Alibaba and Quixey would see Quixey as the sole provider of an app-searching service on YunOS. Alibaba says the move incorporates what it describes as deep-linking technology into YunOS in order to make searching within apps faster and more complete.
One way of doing this is by retrieving and presenting information previously identified and segregated into separate apps. For example, searching for "Thai food" using Quixey's technology would lead the user to search through Groupon, Urbanspoon, OpenTable, Foursquare, Eat24 and other apps related to food. A set of relevant results would show up on a single search results page just by doing a single research on Thai food.
Alibaba has been making investments in U.S. technology companies in the fields of gaming, mobile messaging and online retail over the last year.
Analysts are speculating that Alibaba will be partnering with U.S. groups in the long run in order to support its business in China.
