A government-funded initiative has culminated in the launch of a new search engine called CiHu that finds and indexes maps and other documents online.

The Ministry of Science and Technology, the China Academy of Sciences, the Remote Sensing Application Research Institute of the China Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Zhongyao Diwang Information Technology Company spent four years developing this new CiHu search software, whose name translates into English as "Word Tiger".

CiHu can be used both for online searches and for searches within a user's own computer or network. It features an intelligent program that can find relationships among words and graphics, words and texts, and words and documents.