[echevil]

How so? Google operated in China for more than a decade and never got a major market share, and they already did fairly well compared to others. Facebook was largely unheard of after being available in China for many years before finally got banned in 2010. Amazon has been operating in China forever but is basically irrelevant to most Chinese. Most American companies did terrible job in localization and I see no chance of them winning the competition with their local competitors.

If they face strong local competition in any other country, they'd fail too

[dannyw]

As a Chinese expat, Google China (back when it was operating) was multiple times slower than Baidu and would get blocked by the GFW arbitrarily frequently.

[echevil]

I was able to use Google fine for many years before it was banned. It can get banned when you search for certain keywords, not arbitrary at all.

Google was about the only one I can think of that is not worse than their competitors, and their own product actually don't need much localization.

However, Google failed the growth part in China. Chinese users won't go ahead and set the default search engine to google.com on their own unless they already know about it, especially those don't know English. The homepage used by most Chinese are local websites like hao123 that would send traffic to Baidu

[est]

google.cn is located at its Beijing datacenter. If it's multiple times slower then Google's network optimization was really shit. GFW only works for cross-border connections.