With the recent news of Google's travails against censorship in China (its site was blocked for several hours amid accusations that it was helping to "spread pornography" and break China's strict, if opaque, laws on what is and isn't legitimate online), it seems a good time to be talking about the future of search. Not the future of global search which, I think we can safely assume, will be dominated by Google for years to come. But the future of an altogether more regional internet. In my science and technology piece this month, I cast an eye over the booming field of regional search: and, in particular, at China, which now boasts both the world's largest online community - with almost 300m Chinese citizens online - and a regional internet in which Google is but a minor player compared to the might of home-grown Chinese search engine Baidu.
