Just saw translation of this article on a Google fan site http://google.org.cn/posts/where-google-loses-in-china.html

There's not too many interesting lessons in Google's fail in China. From my point of view it's just Google's ignorance.

Let me share my experience as a native Chinese. When young I learned how to using computer and the Internet after the first grade in middle school, the same time computers and Internet both went popular in all China. All things I know about search engines were Yahoo. But it's domain sucks: http://cn.yahoo.com. It's a damn hard and long English URL for average Chinese. It does not even begin with www and http://www.yahoo.com.cn can not be opened? WTF. If you want do Internet business in China at that time, at least you should have a standard domain name like http://www.company.com.cn and Chinese UI I think? Then there's Google (around 2002 I guess?). People like the idea of 200,000,000 indexed pages, which is much more than Yahoo's number I presume. But Google is even not an ordinary English word. Its pronunciation is stupidly hard. Google even has some encoding problems with Chinese webpages due to too many undeclared encoding during Chinese webpage production. People's last choice? 3721.com or Baidu.com. 3721 is famous because it's CNNIC's company, and there's a old saying in Chinese that 'No matter 3x7=21', and it promotes a nice idea of 'Chinese domain name system' (first as an IE plguin then later join the IDN standard as Punycode, but overall it's adware and malware.). Baidu is and ordinary PinYin word which is easy to remember.

Another reason to choose Baidu is because its site is very fast. Chinese Internet connections were very slow in the beginning, and although Google's page is very simple and clean, it still takes tons of time to load compared to Baidu's Yahoo-like homepage

(http://web.archive.org/web/20020331055621/http://www.baidu.c...)

Then after 2002 or later Google.com is blocked, everyone is using something else and people forget Google completely, until Kaifulee went back to China as president of Google of Greater China in 2005.

One wise decision of Kaifulee is to acquire all former 3721's marketing department, AdScene boosts well in Chinese market. So even though Google China's market share is only half of Baidu's, it's keeps nearly the same avenue as Baidu's without doing evil.

I see great chances of Baidu's fail, because there's still too much innovation to be done in search engines, especially in Chinese culture, because Chinese is very different language and way of thinking. Baidu's Chinese rivals, Tencent SouSou search, Netease 163's YouDao search, Sohu SoGou search are all very competitive and growing. But I don't see Google China is catching up, because Google as a whole is too busy copy twitter. I heard from a inside source that Google is even simulate twitter in one of their primary productivity products. It's very likely that it will result too much of Google's service chain get blocked in China to make Google useless even in high-end users in Beijing and Shanghai. Since twitter, the primary 'color revolution/peace revolution tool' used in Iran makes Chinese government actively bans anything that has a connection with microblogging, and China has already blocked all SSL connections to *.google.com days ago.