A recent Wall Street Journal article points out an interesting wrinkle in Google's ongoing difficulties with providing search services to China. As you might remember from the scandal a year or so ago, Google was only allowed to continue services there after agreeing to censor search results in accordance with the government's wishes, which in turn led to a scolding from critics who felt they were bending to the whim of an oppressive government too easily in order to make a quick buck from serving ads to the country's 1.3 billion people.

Despite giving in on that point, Google still trails the Chinese-focused Baidu.com as the search engine of choice, which the WSJ says may be in large part due to the latter's built-in ability to search for mp3 files.

Some English-language search engines can do this already -- in fact, that's one of the reasons AltaVista has managed to stay marginally relevant long after Lycos and Excite dropped off the map -- and in fact, using certain power-user advanced search options can make it possible to tune your search string for audio files even in Google.

That's still very different from making it readily available the way Baidu does, though -- as you can see, it's pretty obvious, even if you can't read Chinese -- and apparently appealing enough to Chinese web surfers to tip the scales.

The article eventually goes into the details of Google's proposed counter-strike, which involves actually providing properly licensed downloads instead of the legally riskier option of allowing searches for unlicensed material. It's really no more or less hair-brained than most of the other new music services that have been coming out in the States (which is to say that it's pretty fucking hair-brained) but if nothing else it's interesting that even the mighty Google could be stymied by something as seemingly innocuous as easy access to online mp3s.

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