[RickB]

I think some countries use local search engines which beat Google when it comes to local search volumes. For example Most popular search engine in Russia and near by countries is Yandex. I think Baidu is the most popular one in China.

Yes, this is correct for multiple reasons, eg censoring (in Russia and China, it's not as easy to get to google as it is in the US).

And either way, in China they really don't have an option to use Baidu or not...

Actually that's quite an interesting point. Does anyone of you know whether Tor/ VPN is blocked in those countries?
Luckily nothing is blocked in The Netherlands

In China, most (80%) Tor exit nodes are blocked by the Great Firewall. Not sure about VPNs, but those are easier to block than Tor since it's not hard to find their IP's and etc etc etc (so I would assume that maybe 95% of VPNs are blocked). However, it is EXTREMELY difficult to get your hands on Tor Browser (or any Tor/VPN/Proxy related software, for example TAILS), and VPN software (like OpenVPN), because all of their sites and mirrors are blocked by the Great Firewall.

Russia, on the other hand, is MUCH nicer with this (or maybe their censoring methods suck) and it is possible to use VPNs as well as some Tor nodes there, so they can use Tor to access Google (Russia, for god's sake, even offered $110,000 to anyone who could crack Tor).

Well, according to Wikipedia (see source below), the Tor network doesn't seem to be blocked.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shi...#Bypassing