"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 percent 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.

Google acquiesced to China's censors to enter the country in 2006, but has snared only about 35 percent of the search-engine market, according to independent data. Baidu has about 58 percent.

Google's announcement made no mention of its business prospects in China.

But it has said previously that China -- despite having the world's largest number of online users, at 384 million -- remains an insignificant portion of its global revenues.

Google has faced criticism for not doing enough to counter perceptions among some Chinese users that it is an alien interloper.

"In the past, Google didn't like to spend money on ads here, as if they were powerful enough and big enough and didn't need to. But it's a different story in China," said Yu at Analysys International.

Even Google's name poses problems for Zhao Fang, the job-hunting student.

In the Chinese pronunciation, the name comes out as "Gu Ge", which can translate into the somewhat obscure "valley song" or "cereal song".

"A Chinese person can say Baidu fine, but not Google. This is symbolic, I think," Zhao said, stumbling over the name despite his perfect English.

earlier related report
China's Baidu sues US web firm over hacker attack
Beijing (AFP) Jan 20, 2010 - China's top Internet search engine Baidu said Wednesday it had sued a US web firm after its site was hacked, a new salvo in a growing spat after Google's threat to quit the country because of cyberattacks.

Google, which trails Baidu in market share in China, said last week it may abandon its Chinese search engine and possibly leave the country altogether over what it called a "highly sophisticated" attack by China-based hackers and state censorship.

The announcement has thrown a spanner into already frayed Sino-US ties, with Washington calling for an explanation and Beijing defending its right to filter information available on the web and telling foreign firms to obey the law.

"Today Baidu filed a lawsuit against its domain name registration service provider Register.com Inc. in a US court in New York, seeking damages over the incident of Baidu's service interruption last week," the Chinese firm said.

Nasdaq-listed Baidu said its site went down for hours after the January 12 attack by a group identifying itself as the "Iranian Cyber Army", the name used by hackers who briefly shut down the Twitter microblogging site last month.

Baidu spokesman Victor Tseng said at the time that service had been interrupted "due to external manipulation of its DNS (domain name server) in the United States".

In its statement Wednesday, Baidu said the software behind its domain name "was unlawfully and maliciously altered" as a result of the "gross negligence" of Register.com.

This led to "users from many places around the world being unable to access the Baidu website for a number of hours and causing serious damages to Baidu".

Register.com is a leading domain registration service that manages more than 2.5 million domain names, according to the company's website. Officials there were not available for immediate comment.

A Baidu spokeswoman said the company would not provide any further information on the lawsuit.

Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based Internet consultant, said the timing of the suit would fuel speculation that it was in response to the Google ultimatum.

"The suspicion will be that Baidu wants it to appear that even as its American rival was under attack from sophisticated Chinese hackers, Baidu was also suffering attacks that, though perhaps not originating in the US, were at least made possible by the negligence of an American domain name registrar," he said.

Google has said the cyberattacks against it were likely aimed at gaining access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, but has said it does not believe that goal was achieved.

The company is checking whether any of its China staff helped hackers lead the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Google said Tuesday it had postponed the launch in China of two mobile phones featuring its Android operating system and developed in conjunction with Motorola and Samsung -- evidence of potential commercial fallout from the row.

The phones were to be used on China Unicom's network.

A Chinese commerce ministry spokesman said last week the row would not affect overall trade and economic relations between China and the United States.

In Washington, senior US diplomat Kurt Campbell said Tuesday that US and Chinese officials had held "multiple meetings" over the Google case, and plan to have more in the coming days.

"Google's China employees are very important to Google. We are going to have communication with the government... we want to have a positive outcome with the government," Google spokeswoman Marsha Wang told AFP on Wednesday.

But some observers have suggested Google's tough stance may also have some basis in its difficulties in penetrating the Chinese market.

"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 focused on China's media industry that is itself blocked in the country.

Baidu had 58.4 percent of China's search engine market in the final quarter of last year, followed by 35.6 percent for Google China, according to Internet research firm Analysys International.

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