What's the leading search engine in China? If you said Google, you're showing your Western bias. It's actually Baidu.com, whose stock debuted on the Nasdaq exchange on August 5, raising some $87 million for the startup.

Companies like Baidu are now riding a wave of investor expectations that Internet searching will become a big business in China--and that local search companies may understand how to reach Chinese consumers better than outsiders like Google.

Those new consumers are, of course, much poorer on average than U.S. or European shoppers. But there are 1.3 billion of them, and the Chinese economy continues to grow at about 9 percent per year, spawning a middle class with real spending power, especially in coastal cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou.

"There are already about 30 million [Chinese] who can afford to buy luxury goods," says William Bao Bean, a vice-president at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. "That should grow to 100 million in three years. China is set to eclipse Japan in spending on luxury goods by the end of the decade."

An increasing number of Chinese consumers will be finding those goods on the Web, and both Chinese and international search companies—such as Baidu, Sohu, Sina, Google, and Yahoo—are scrambling for a piece of the pie.

For the moment, Baidu and Google are in the lead. A recent survey by the government-controlled China Internet Network Information Center, showed Baidu with an average market share of 47.8 percent in China's three largest cities, compared with 33.0 percent for Google. All other competitors lagged far behind.

While Baidu's revenues are relatively slender--$8.4 million for the second quarter of 2005, compared with $1.38 billion at Google--it remains the world's most visited Chinese language website, according to statistics collected by Alexa Internet.

It also earns a far greater share of Chinese advertising dollars than Google, according Jim Sun, an Internet industry analyst with Evolution Securities in Shanghai. Indeed, that may be why Google itself bought a minority stake in Baidu in June. (The size of the deal was not disclosed.)

The company's local connections and home-grown business practices are what give it an advantage over rivals, according to Sun. For example, Baidu doesn't require clients to use a credit card to pay for their ads, as Google does.

"Google's revenues [in China] last year were below 50 million RMB [US$6.1 million]...because people have to pay Google through credit card, and Chinese clients seldom use credit cards," says Sun.