Chinese search engine users have very different habits from Americans. That's what President of Google China Dr. Kai-Fu Lee told the Yale Club of Beijing.

Google is number two in China, with about 26 percent of the market. The homegrown search engine Baidu has 60 percent market share and Yahoo has about 10 percent, according to the data firm Analysys International. A lot of foreign search engines have tripped up in China. So Google's trotted out a team of psychologists and sociologists to find out what Chinese users want.

Here are some of their findings.

CHINESE SEARCH LONGER AND ARE "MORE CURIOUS” THAN AMERICAN USERS
Chinese users spend 30 to 60 seconds on search results, compared to ten seconds for Americans. Dr. Lee gave several reasons why. Americans are more results oriented. They find what they want and get out of there. Chinese are curious, and want to explore. They are not satisfied with one answer. They also aren't used to having well-organized information. One respondent said she expected the top results to be ads, so she automatically ignores the top results. In response to the findings, Google displays search results differently on its China site than on its U.S. site. On the U.S. website the search page closes after you click on an entry. On the Chinese site the search results page stays open so users can go back and click some more. But Dr. Lee confessed convincing web surfers that the most relevant results might actually be listed first, is an issue Google's not on top of.

CLICKAHOLICS: CHINESE DON'T LIKE TO TYPE
Typing in Chinese is a pain. First, users input the phonetic spelling. Then they have to choose among the various characters with the same pronunciation. For example, if you type "Shishi" you might have 20 combinations to chose from. Soooo.... Google software helps out by making an intelligent guess of which character the user wants based on the context from previous characters. Personally, I find this most helpful... not least because my Chinese is not up to snuff.

GOOGLE IS TOOOOOO DIFFICULT FOR CHINESE TO SPELL
Half of Chinese Google users can't spell "Google" So, forget the English name. You can now reach the Chinese version by simply typing in "G.cn" Anyone interested in registering "Y.cn?" Too late. It's already taken. For the record, the Chinese name written in characters is "Guge" which literally means "valley song." It, too, leads to www.google.cn.

CHINESE LIKE INFORMATION ON THEIR MOBILE PHONES
Among the 25 Chinese products Google launched last year. One was a search system for mobile phone users (web-enabled phones are not yet widely available here.) Send a search term to a telephone number and it will send the information to the phone. Cool, I thought. I tried it three times, closely following the Chinese language instructions on Google.cn, and... bingo... no response. Hmmm...

CHINA SPECIFIC SERVICES: SNOWSTORM FINDER, GOOGLE-FUNDED MOBILE PHONE GREETINGS
One of the niftier products Chinese engineers came up with, literally overnight, was a map that provided users with the latest news updates on the snow disaster that struck during this month's Chinese New Year travel rush. Users could find out what was going on in places where their loved ones were stuck, or where they were trying to get. But even those who were stranded far from friends and family could get help from Google in delivering their New Years greeting. In China it's popular to send greetings by mobile phone. Google introduced a new service that allows users to chose a greeting online and send it to everyone in their mobile phone address book for free-- Google picks up the bill in exchange for a brief ad.

Finally, another "no brainer" reason why it's important to grasp the minds of Chinese internet users. Dr. Lee pointed out that this year China's population of internet users will overtake the U.S. And soon China's total internet population (210 million as of the end of 2007, with six million new users every month) will overtake the entire population of the United States. At that point, he noted, it will be difficult for the U.S. to ever regain the lead.

Oh yeah, one more thing. What did Dr. Lee have to say about internet censorship in China, or the Great Firewall (GFW)? You guessed it. He said he wouldn't take questions on this. Or, to be more precise, he said reporters in the audience "won't get a very satisfactory answer" if they ask. In my book that's a soft-shoe form of censoring. No reporters in the audience were called on.

As someone who lives behind the GFW, I, for one, would rather have a censored version of Google , than no Google. And most of my Chinese friends feel the same. But Google China's president shouldn't collude with the state information controllers by discouraging searching questions.