Interesting. I had not seen that stat. Any idea how they were able to grow their market share so quickly? Obviously the government subsidies gave them the requisite funding, but what was making consumers choose Baidu over Google even before China started crippling Google?
Not only that. They had an entire MP3 search engine!
There were also in the early years language issues, and coverage issues. Internet access in/out of China is absurdly, mind bendingly expensive, due partly to all the DPI hardware they insist sits at the border. This makes crawling China from outside very hard. Conversely it also makes crawling the rest of the internet from inside harder as well, but Chinese users mostly want local content so that's no big deal, necessarily.
China was tipping the playing field in lots of ways back then, there was lots of one-sided enforcement of very vague rules. It was pretty clear which way the winds were blowing there.