Are the Chinese Google and YouTube clones any good?

With Google threatening to pull out of China, immitation versions of the search engine and its video subsidiary YouTube have emerged to take their places on the Chinese internet:

YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based Web giant not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.

The search engine behind Goojje was likely designed before the Google-China kerfuffle began then renamed as a marketing gimmick, and indeed the results it returns are fairly different than Google’s. (Goojje vs. Google searching for "Foreign Policy".). The site apparently complies with Chinese censorship guidelines, like the old chinese google. I tried searching for "Dalai Lama" and got his official website. "Rebiya Kadeer" worked also. When I typed in a Google-translated version of "Dalai Lama" in Chinese characters, the top result was an article titled, "The Road of Treason." When I typed in "Falun Gong," in English, I got an error message. The same thing happened on multiple computers.

YouTubeCn is more more freewheeling, with videos on the persecution of Falun Gong and Rebiya Kadeer available. While the layout is an almost exact rip-off of YouTube, the videos are really buggy with many requiring new versions of flash player and others not working at all.

Neither site seems like much of a substitute for the one it’s based on in terms of functionality. I don’t think Baidu should have much to worry about.