Could you elaborate on how they suffer with Baidu? I've found it to be top-notch and better than Google for the normal searches made in China. I generally make it my default while there even when using a VPN.
Here's one long running anecdote. I've been operating a self-published book site for over five years. All Chinese content. Some of the books are banned in China. Much of the content no China online publisher will touch.
Baidu loves my site. Searches are often in the top three results on Baidu. I have no ads and pay Baidu nothing. Don't even help them find my site. Baidu even runs its own book site and gives my site plenty of love. To my knowledge the site has never been blocked by the GFW.
Google barely knows I exist even though I follow all their webmaster rules. I'm not sure if its because of low page rank or Google not being great at Chinese content.
I suppose my point is page rank isn't the only way to go or at least having a strong reliance on page rank may leave out unique or rare content that isn't marketed (quality inbound links) heavily.
As a foreigner living in China and who can't read Chinese, Baidu is close to useless. There's always Bing but Google gives much superior results for the types of searches I do. That being said, the vast majority of Chinese don't "suffer" from Baidu and wouldn't switch to Google if it came back.
