Google in China

Google was founded by two graduate students- Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.Their mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  The company attracted many users rapidly by making Internet searches easy, fast, effective, and unbiased. Unlike its competitors, Google acted consistently with its core principle of “Do no evil,” by showing its search results in order of calculated relevance to searches rather than in order of advertising payments. Google’s highest global market shares for online search reached nearly 85% in 2004. By 2009, Google offered search options in more than 110 languages and maintained offices in plenty of countries.

As of 2000, Google ran their business in China with a Chinese-language version but had no local office or employees operating. The content on Google.cn website was filtered by Chinese Internet providers, and access to the website was slow. In 2005, Google build a research and development center in China, which was supported by highly educated and trained engineers. By 2009, Google’s employees in China had reach to 700 people. Google’s revenues in China during 2009 were estimated to be $300 million, around 1% of the total revenues in Google.

 In the third quarter of 2009, Google had a market share in search engines of around 31%, compared with 64% for Baidu, the leading search engine in China.

In January 2013, Google posted an online memo stating that the company had detected highly sophisticated attacks coming from China on its computer security systems. They found out the primary objective of the hackers was getting access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The memo also said that, since Google entered China market, they had been weighing the importance of increasing access to information for Chinese citizens over compromising with censorship of search results and other interventions posed by the Chinese government. Affected by the attacks and also by...