BEIJING: Beijing college student Zhao Fang says he admires Internet giant Google for standing up to China, but admits that won’t make him any more likely to use the world’s top search engine.
“Baidu is better for Chinese users,” Zhao said, referring to China’s search market leader, as the 22-year-old clicked through a jobs website in a cybercafe.
“I have never felt as comfortable using Google, which feels like it is made by a foreign company,” he said.
Zhao’s appraisal came after Google’s announcement last week that it could abandon google.cn and leave China entirely.
Google cited cyberattacks and censorship, but observers say there may be also be a realisation that it remains hard to deliver on the promise of China’s fabled market of 1.3 billion consumers.
“If Google was making billions and billions of dollars, I think this would be a different story,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of Danwei.org, a website focussed on China’s media industry that is itself blocked in the country.
While many ventures have prospered during China’s three-decade opening to the world, that period is also littered with examples of foreign companies whose plans went awry.
The reasons range from cultural and linguistic factors, to rules seen as stacking the deck in favour of domestic competitors, to the misguided faith of some firms that success elsewhere will translate into big sales in China.
But no sectors are perhaps as hard to crack as the Internet and media, which are among the most heavily regulated due to the communist government’s strict controls on the flow of information.
“It’s very, very tough. It’s one of the most hostile environments in the world for foreign media and Internet companies,” Goldkorn said.
“There is not one foreign Internet company that has made a success of it here — not a single one.”
Two years after entering China, Google’s competitor Yahoo! signed a deal in 2005 to buy 40 per cent of Alibaba.com while handing over the running of its local operations to the Chinese e-commerce giant.
Tensions in the relationship erupted on Sunday when Alibaba condemned the support offered by Yahoo! to Google as “reckless”.
Edward Yu, head of Internet research firm Analysys International, said his company’s surveys showed many web-users preferred Baidu in searches for local content.
“There are definitely Google-lovers out there but if you are looking for local information, Baidu is seen as a better choice,” he said.
Baidu is seen as catering better to China’s legions of youthful online users with its focus on entertainment content such as music downloads rather than news or other information.
And it has far more of the online forums that provide one of China’s few avenues for public expression, analysts say. Baidu has also spent lavishly on advertising to perpetuate its status as the more “Chinese” search engine, said Yu.
While Baidu basks in a high profile, three of the biggest names on the global Internet — Google-owned YouTube, micro-blogging site Twitter and social networking site Facebook — are all blocked in China. — AFP