Kai-Fu Lee joined the company back in 2004, when Google was beginning its adventure in earnest and became the giant's President of Google Greater China and vice president for engineering. Unfortunately, mean old Microsoft reared its head and sued Google, for Lee was bound by a pesky "no competition" contract clause. The companies eventually settled, and Google hoped to go full speed ahead into uncharted territories. China's government, however, had other plans, and soon lured the company into its controversial web of censorship and, to add insult to injury, favored competitor, Baidu.

Despite the uphill battle, Google has made a few strides in recent months and gained 6 percent on Baidu. But that means little, because Baidu still controls about 62% of search traffic, while Google has a scant 21%.

Now Lee has abandoned his post to pursue some hush-hush "new venture" in Beijing, and Google's attempting trying desperately to refocus its energies by splitting his duties between two executives while simultaneously double its sales force. After five years struggling to be the big wig, you would think Google would give up on imposing its capitalist ideals amidst an aggressive communist state. But that's the magic of the internet: it's a field of ambitious dreams rife with international and political barriers.

In Russia, 46 percent of all search queries go through Yandex, which the FT says plans to list itself on a US stock market this spring.

Seznam sees 63 percent of all searches in the Czech Republic. Google exec Mohammad Gawdat says its for a good reason, telling the FT his company "did not initially match the locals in the quality of its local language results."

CEO Eric Schmidt says Google has an excuse in China, where the government favored local company Baidu, which still controls 60 percent of all local searches .“All of us should tell the Chinese that their local markets need to be open to foreign investment, they need not favor their local competitors," Schmidt told the FT.

Japanese Internet users prefer portals to Google's simple search engine. It's one reason Google actually trails Yahoo in the country.

Naver in South Korea owns 60 percent of the search market. Portals are popular in the country, too. Naver's most successful feature, according to the FT, is a questions and answers service similar to Yahoo Answers. Google recently acqured blogging software company TNC in hopes of becoming more portal-like in South Korea.

The common theme among Google's global failures? Summarizes the FT:

Google has played second fiddle to rivals who invested much earlier, perfected their technology to work with local languages and came up with innovations that Google is now having to copy.

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

Offer free, licensed music downloads to all of China. It is, in some ways, a brilliant move. In the U.S., when Google paid to license the music in uploaded videos, it raised the financial bar beyond what most YouTube's rivals could afford. It now hopes to beggar Baidu by forcing it to pay up, too — and the music industry is on its side. In Baidu's favor, however, is consumer indifference. In a country where you can buy bootlegs for pocket change, sanctioned MP3s are unlikely to be much of a draw. (Photo by Romain Guy)

The Chinese search company not only has a home-team advantage over interlopers like Yahoo and Google, but it also has the support of the Chinese government, thanks to its cheerful compliance with government censorship. Clive Thompson reported in April that Baidu allegedly ratted out Google to the Chinese government, one of many competitive tricks the company is said to commit.

The Times, though, focuses on Baidu's founder Robin Li and his early adoption of "link analysis" (ranking sites by how many others link to them) and keyword ads in search results. And don't forget Baidu's advertised ability to recognize punctuation.

One more hint comes from the New York Times style. It's an old trick of the Times to put the marginalized story in the second rebuttal half of an article. ("...in short, McDonald's is optimistic. But a fast food critic says...") Savvy readers often skip to this bit for the "real" story. In this case, though, the Times waits until 3/4 through the piece to give some opposition time, and the sourced quotes are sparse there. This piece is a solid vote for Baidu.

The Rise of Baidu (That's Chinese for Google) [NY Times]

So kudos to Google for finally dropping the 2.6% share in Baidu that it took last year. Now Google has to stop getting blocked (yes, even the censored site sometimes isn't censored enough), rev up its marketing campaign, and find a way to keep the Chinese government happy without pissing off all the observers in the free world.

Google Searches for a Home in China [BusinessWeek]

The tiles that flew from the sky are order from a Chinese emperor for catching wanted people. The word "jua" that accompanied each flying tile means "to catch" or "to search" in Mandarin.

The guy who received the tiles is the old time police who is in charge of catching (searching) wanted people. The people caught are different "famous" ancient Chinese characters (real or in fictions). One was a thief, one was a woman who was caught having an affair, etc., and the Caucasian of course is James Bond.

The ending tag line said "with Baidu, you can 'find' whoever you want to search for" and the end titles talked about how many Chinese web sites Baidu has on their database, etc. (talking about Baidu's search capability).

Cheeky! But an honest representation of that down-n-dirty style Baidu showed by ratting out Google in China. Life's more fun when your motto is "Be evil."

After the jump, another copy of that ad.

Earlier: What does this Chinese Baidu ad mean? [Valleywag]

Baidu ad [YouTube]

Guge, the Chinese-branded Google service, recently released a pansy-ass watercolor ad. Shanghai blog China Snippets posts a translation (here's the SWF with sound). The ad copy includes wannabe koans like "One piece of information is like one blade of grass. Together they build up a big, green, endless lawn."

How wise. How placid. How boring. Can someone find a new Baidu ad? With swords?

Google "Guge" Valley Song flash movie translated [China Snippets via Google Blogoscoped]

A young Chinese-American entrepreneur in Beijing told me that she had heard that the instigator of the Google blockade was Baidu, which in 2002 had less than 3 percent of the search market compared with Google's 24 percent. "Basically, some Baidu people sat down and did hundreds of searches for banned materials on Google," she said. [...] "Then they took all the results, printed them up and went to the government and said, 'Look at all this bad stuff you can find on Google!' That's why the government took Google offline."

Baidu denies it. But inside they must be thinking, "Man, we are badass."

Google in China: The Big Disconnect (page 3) [NYT Magazine]

What's really funny about the Socializr offices to me (I live next door) is that they are in the building just-until-a-couple-of-months-ago occupied by Pud (who now owns AdBrite).

About 6 months ago, I was out walking my dog, and saw that there was all this AdBrite trash out front: old plaques with yellowed Wall Street Journal clippings profiling the genius who started the F*ed Company phenomenon, with little brass titles of the date of the Journal article.

If it weren't for the fact that they were likely already peed on by various dogs and homeless people, I totally would have taken them home.

After the jump, the four honorable mentions.

Makethelogobigger finds his own favorite Steve Jobs edition.

Going with a write-in candidate here: Noah Wyle as Jobs in his Tucker Carlson phase.

Kyle Bunch broke the Internet.

Sorry everybody, my fault. I accidentally tripped over a cord.

Blackjack loves Baidu's martial-arts play but knows revenge is inevitable.

Bad. Ass. But will we see a Google ad that continues this one by turning the swordsman into a pincushion like Jet Li's character in "Hero"?

dljfs wants Marissa Mayer to croak "Koyaanisqatsi."

"Larry used the scanner, and she flipped the pages of a book to the rhythm of a metronome. They managed to get through a 300-page thick book in little over 35 minutes."

Google is starting a band! Sounds sorta Phillip Glass-y. I bet the light show will be AWESOME.

Have a snappy comeback? E-mail it in and win a Valleywag comment account.

No word on whether Baidu will put out another ass-kicking promo ad. A YouTube user just revealed Baidu's ad from its NASDAQ debut last summer. (And we've already seen them beat up Google.)

American Stock Exchange to Trade Options On Baidu.Com, Inc. [PR News Wire]
Baidu.com, Inc. [Google Finance]
Baidu NASDAQ ad [YouTube]
Earlier: Baidu: Funnier than Google [Valleywag]