When you need to turn to a search engine, which one do you choose? Google? Baidu? Or any of the others? A new market report released by China Internet Network Information Center or CNNIC shows that most Beijing netizens choose baidu as their first choice, while Shanghai netizens prefer google.

What this analyst misses is common to search engine or browser comparisons, stateside: the installed institutional base. Corporations and governments leave their users with nothing but IE/MSN. The well-established Baidu search engine has the advantage of being in place everywhere — including websites like the one carrying this article.

The most interesting part in the report is that they found in Beijing, nearly half of the interviewees don’t know how to spell GOOGLE. Only 43 percent of interviewees can correctly pronounce GOOGLE, 26 percent of them called it “Gou Gou”, “doggy” in English. And 13 percent of them called GOOGLE as “Gu Gou”, means “old dog” in English.

I wonder what BALMER means?