Chinese prefer Google to homegrown search

China's burgeoning web community is apparently shunning homegrown search engines in favour of US staples.

According to a new report from web consultancy Keynote Systems, Google China is topping the list of the country's favourite search engines, beating Chinese offerings such as the newly floated Baidu.com and Alibaba, which is partly owned by Yahoo!.

More than a thousand consumers were monitored for the report, using a number of search engines over various categories of searches - general text, news, images and music. Google was only beaten in the music search category, by Baidu.

Chinese users' gripes about local search engines included cluttered design, too many ads and out-of-date or irrelevant results.

China's web users are also likely to convert to the US search giant in the future, the study found.

Baidu remains ahead of Google in market share - but Google's prospects are far from bleak, considering its success in charming the Chinese. According to Keynote Systems, this success with customer experience could well translate into greater market share for the US player in the long term.