Robin Li, CEO of Baidu

internet - "A passion for search"

Baidu is gaining market share very fast in the domestic search market and attention is focusing on the man who all did it. The New York Times has a nice summery of Baidu's rise and some good background on its CEO, Robin Li. (One time registration required).
The picture that emerges is that Google could do very well, as long as there was no domestic competition.
Lee Kaifu, the president of Google China gets one quote and I tend to disagree with him:

Google, of course, will have none of this, stressing the independence of its search results and the international reach it offers users. “People want information and they want global information,” says Kaifu Lee, the president of Google in China. “We can’t be bought.”

According to the research I know, only about three percent of the Chinese internet users tends to peek at websites outside mainland China. So, the strength of any search engine should be at the local market.
What I find remarkable is the way Baidu mixes up its search results with commercial messages and gets away with it. Obvious the Chinese users care less about that than I do.