I was surprised to see this public service advertisement from Google here on Banner Blindness.  I’m certainly not upset that Google is taking my ad inventory and using it to promote social welfare - this site isn’t really meant to make advertising revenue, but to find clients.  I wonder though: could Google be using the Chinese earthquake catastrophe to increase its goodwill with China and thus its search and advertising presence in China?  Serious investors are very cognizant of the fact that Baidu is a serious threat to the long term growth of Google.  Google has to take serious steps, such as raising money for Chinese disaster relief, in order to strategically position itself with Chinese communist leadership.  Baidu is a Chinese company, and therefore, the Chinese leaders want its nation to use a Chinese product - why send all the potential profits back to America?  Below is a screen shot of the Google Chinese disaster relief page:

There are also some additional resources on this page that are rather interesting - and of course they utilize Google products such as Google Maps (waring: link may take a long time to load as its in Chinese characters).  Google is having a hard time convincing the Chinese internet-going public to use its products.  Google is experiencing international growth headaches just as eBay has been facing them as well.  It seems like these types of international growth issues are the only “large scale” issues that I personally studied in college.  Google would be far better off purchasing Baidu instead of trying to compete with it; and eventually losing.  However, I think that Google is hesitant to purchase Baidu because they fear government intervention and losing billions to government interference.  Chinese communist leaders could determine that Google controls too much of the media in its country and reclaim Baidu, at Google’s expense.  China is still by far the fastest growing internet audience in the world and Google desperately needs them to switch from Baidu to Google.  Could this Chinese earthquake disaster be the stepping stone that Google needs in order to get the Communist leadership to assist it in gaining competitive advantage?  It certainly seems that way. aside from the fact that Google is “Doing no evil”.