I find that it's broken down a lot by education / social class. The white-collar workers are more likely to use Google than the bulk of the population, which certainly uses Baidu by default. That said, when Google pulled out, a lot of my Chinese friends also switched to Baidu.<p>It's totally understandable why: Google China sucks. It's slow and plagued by connection resets and random outages.<p>Also, it's painful to use as an English speaker. The default locale keeps switching back to Chinese, regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. Google refuses to remember that I want English search results. It really sucks to Google for "Java API" and to have the first search page full of Chinese forum pages where the only English is "Java API" and Oracle's official API docs maybe on page 2. Using a VPN is too slow to merit use instead of Bing. So I've given up, I now Bing all day.<p>Regarding the reason: Google didn't lose because it's a foreign company, it lost because it refused to understand the market. KFC, GE, Apple, and tons of other American companies clean up in China. Google lost because it wouldn't play ball.
420M people all talking about things on the Internet, and I have no idea what they're talking about since I don't know Chinese. And I suspect the majority of them have no idea what the English Internet is talking about either.<p>Even though it was obvious this would be the state of things one day, I still find it somewhat disconcerting that I can't use the Internet to develop an understanding of what such a consequential demographic of the human race are thinking and perceiving.<p>Such a massive problem, and I hope to live to see the day when it is solved, and ML/NLP provides truly reliable, accurate translation across such disparate languages.
That "99%" does not mean that the rest of the search engines share 1% - people use different search engines for different types of queries. As some commenters pointed out on previous days' news submissions: "if you want to find music/videos, go to Baidu, if you want to find foreign information, go to Google".
Fun Fact: Baidu not only imitates Google in its simplistic design, but also in Server HTTP header, which reports: BWS/1.0, as opposed to Google's GWS (I believe before it was GWS/1.0).
regarding the 420M number, i believe that the number is actually higher than that because there's a large population of internet cafe users that are hard to count. what's even more amazing, imho, is the number of mobile users: 600M+.<p>all foreign internet companies have failed in china (meaning they did not take a majority of the market): ebay, paypal, google, twitter, facebook, yahoo, youtube, etc.<p>it is definitely protectionism. the copy cat companies make a fortune in china, no comment on who that benefits mostly.
Google is losing China because the Chinese government will do whatever it takes to make sure domestic companies win in the long run. They will throttle bandwidth, block IPs, subsidize, threaten, deny permits, and use any other levers of power - subtly but effectively - until Chinese companies dominate the domestic market.<p>Baidu does a great job, but these reasons that Google "was not close enough" are a smokescreen for what's really going on there.