[kev6168]

Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day.

So not being able to rely on search, people have to memorize companies' urls, to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string. Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more important in China than elsewhere.

Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

[CharlesColeman]

> Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

I'd rather them wait until they are no longer required to censor their results and track their users on behalf of the state security apparatus.

[schuke]

Most people would rather want this because you don’t have to bear the consequences. To simulate the experience, I suggest you start using a censored Bing exclusively while dialing down its search relevancy 30-40% for a start. Make sure you also realize the political reality that your rulers would rather go North Korea than giving up censorship.

[eiliant]

bing is ok, it’s no google though but much better than say baidu

[kev6168]

yeah, my default search engine is bing. But sometimes you have the feeling it probably has less stuff in its database than what baidu has crawled and collected. Out of habit I rarely use 360 or sogou so I don't know how they fair compared to baidu or bing.

[000DC47F]

Yeah, I've found Bing to the best option when I'm in the mainland, only because all the local search are even more terrible at english.

When I need to search in Chinese, baidu is the least terrible (but still really bad). Sogou isn't too far behind, but it's index is not as fresh, in my experience.

[y4mi]

Can't you use duckduckgo with the !g toggle for Google results?

[wodenokoto]

That’s interesting. In japan they’ve gone the complete opposite route:

Instead of telling you the web address they tell you which keyword to type into search, sometimes even with an animation of it being typed into the search bar.