Google brand awareness soars in China

BEIJING: Web search engine Google's brand awareness in China has soared after the firm threatened to pull-out of the country over hacking of email accounts of many human rights activists, a research firm said.

Edward Yu, president of domestic research firm Analysys International, told China Daily Tuesday that his company has sensed a significant growth of search inquiries for Google.

"The search inquiries for Google have seen a great rise during the past few days in China and a large number of them came from third- and fourth-tier cities, where previously few people know about the company," said Yu.

He said searches from outside big cities have risen "many times" compared with a week ago.

In a statement on its blog Jan 13, the world's second biggest corporate said it has detected in December "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google."

The main goal of the attackers was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, the statement said. But they didn't succeed as "only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves," Google said.

Although there are no figures yet from other research firms to corroborate Analysys' findings, an online traffic track tool provided by Baidu Inc, Google's major competitor in China, revealed that search inquiries for the US search engine increased 79 percent in China during the past week.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Tuesday that foreign enterprises doing business in China, including Google, should respect Chinese laws and regulations.