No, nothing happened to the Mountain View-based Internet giant, the catch is that the place the survey has been conducted in is China, and Google never owned the majority of the shares there. Baidu has and, by the looks of it, it will still reign supreme for a couple of years. After all, the China-based search engine had more searches run through it than Microsoft on a global level. You gotta respect that!

Baidu had a 60.1 percent of the pie, according to the Q4 study conducted by research firm Analysts International. Google trailed with (only) 25.9 percent and the third position was taken by Yahoo! China, with 9.6 percent. Things, despite looking pretty cloudy for Google, aren't all that grim, it actually recorded a growth of 2.2 percent compared to the previous quarter.

Baidu, on the other hand, did not record significant changes in its percentages, and put together with its runner-up and the bronze winning Yahoo, the three accounted for about 96 percent of the total search market. The total figures, reported into local currency, mean about 946.6 million yuan, roughly 131.4 million U.S. dollars. Compared to the figures from other countries, this might not sound as much for the Mountain View-based company. Let's not forget, though, that the Chinese Internet using community is the second largest in the world, after that of the United States, with 210 million users at the end of 2007. Mind you, it is still growing and bound to become the largest, early this year.

Google's increase could be in part credited to the mobile short message search service that it has launched since the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Baidu is currently considering expanding into the Japanese Internet search market, where Google is the leader. They seem to want to battle it wherever there is a battlefield available.