Google's Strategy

The uprising of Google did not come as some surprise following a series of hackers' attacks coming from China. The whole standing against the Chinese government  earned Google the good will of free speech and human rights advocates. But of course, all that also came at some cost. First of all while retaining some position at the biggest Internet market it can severely weaken its position and potentially lose search traffic.
At the moment Chinese smartphone market is experiencing a real boom, and Google can hurt its ambitious plans to expand into it. Lots of local phone makers and network carriers are introducing phones and tablets running the Android software.  But those devices have already been stripped of the Google’s search engine replaced with its main rival Baidu. For Google, which makes its money placing ads linked to search results, it means losing a huge audience for mobile advertising.
In addition, not only Google is facing difficulties when operating in the Chinese market. eBay and Yahoo have failed to gain significant traction here. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are being blocked by the government. At the same time the popularity of the local search engines such as Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba is rising bringing high profits to its management and shareholders. According to some estimates hold by China Market Research Group only 12% of the Chinese-language users switch to Google when searching for some information. Most users find that Baidu provides far better Chinese-language results, while Google suits better for foreign-language inquiries.  As foreign languages have always been prerogatives of better-educated people, it is this layer of the population that might suffer from Google’s opposition to the government. But at the same time, this population group usually has lots of opportunities to travel abroad and get access to unfiltered information anyway. It seems that the government decided to ignore the educated population and focus its governmental care on the remained millions limiting their access to the Internet content.