Google's threat to pull out of China may have been met with a shrug in some circles, but there's a population of Chineses citizens who appear to be genuinely worried about the prospect: scientists. Nature conducted an informal survey of Chinese researchers, and got nearly 800 responses. Well over 90 percent of those who responded say they use Google for searches, and 48 percent felt that the loss of Google would create a significant problem for their research.

There are a number of reasons for the scientists' attachment to Google. Although Baidu has done well by tailoring its search service to the sites frequented by the Chinese public, science has remained a field where most of the top research takes place in English. As such, Google's massive index of English-language material, especially works that have found their way into Google Scholar, provide the company's search offerings with distinct advantages. In fact, Google Search and Scholar were the services most often used by the respondents (Maps and Mail were also heavily used).

There are specialized scientific search services, such as the PubMed index, but these don't offer the same level of sophistication as Google. They also don't bring in a broad set of additional materials from outside the realm of academic publishing, such as faculty webpages and the sites of scholarly organizations. Although searching for papers accounted for the largest use of Google cited (at 82 percent of respondents), basic science news and information about other labs were cited by 57 percent, accessing databases by 46, and searches for conferences and meetings by 40 percent.

To be sure, some of those polled didn't feel that Google offered anything special—one told Nature that "It doesn’t matter whether we have Google for science—we have PubMed." But others were equally adamant that the company provides an essential service for researchers (one compared its loss to going blind), and the numbers seem to suggest this group is in the majority. Chinese scholars are increasingly engaged in the international scientific community, training, working, and publishing abroad with regularity. As such, they need access to services that provide full access to that community; the loss of Google would apparently limit their options when it comes to those services.

Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/4631012a