Poochandi

April 02, 2010

It's over a week since Google rerouted its China operations to Hong Kong after a spat with the government here, but users in the mainland continue to log on to Google.com.hk, belying predictions that they would shift to home-grown search engine 'Baidu'.

After the US-based Google, the world's popular search engine, began rerouting mainland traffic to its Hong Kong site, its Chinese users did not shift en masse to rival Baidu Inc, the state run 'China Daily' said in a report today.

Google enjoyed a 30 per cent market share in the nearly 400 million subscriber Chinese internet market.

According to Alexa Internet, a United States-based online web traffic tracker, traffic on Baidu only increased 1.3 per cent in the past seven days since Google announced on March 23 it would stop censoring its Chinese search results and closed down its Google.cn.