UCWeb and Alibaba have a new offering for mobile users: a straightforward search engine that goes right into bringing up most widely-used mobile content such as apps, ebooks and shopping portals.

Shen Ma, the new mobile search engine, will supplement conventional search engines but will not waste users' time by bringing up everything on the web in response to search queries.

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Instead, it brings up available content from mobile apps, ebooks and shopping portals.

The development of Shen Ma, which began in July 2013, came up when the two tech giants acknowledged a growing vertical where mobile users are seen to be spending more time on their apps than in mobile browsers.

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu believes that by the end of the year, the amount of search queries on mobile will beat that of PC search.

The success of China's Wandoujia, a popular search engine for mobile entertainment which has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, proved that there was indeed an emerging shift toward mobile content search.

Interestingly, Shen Ma is a Mandarin expression that has found its way into the Urban dictionary.  It simply means "what?" or "huh?"

Shen Ma came online Monday at m.sm.cn.

Sina says UCWeb owns 70 percent of the new mobile content browser while Alibaba owns 30 percent.

Future developments on Shen Ma may include image and voice search, according to the developers.

It is not clear as of yet how Shen Ma will be integrated into UCWeb's other products like the UC Browser which has 500 million active users.

Alibaba's growing interest in mobile search became apparent when it invested US$50 million in the US-based search engine Quixey last October.