It’s no secret that Alexa rankings can be (and are) far from accurate even within U.S. oriented markets. Reason is quite simple: the stats are approximated based on the Alexa toolbar–and its use across a tiny segment of overall Internet usage. The most popular argument against Alexa is thus that its users belong to a certain narrow demographic of (often) spyware infected computers–or, otherwise, unware users. Well, in China Alexa is even less relevent due to a simple prevalance of different browsers and overall adoption of software. Yet, awhile back a company, 91bi.com, formed a partnership with Alexa to provide rankings for Chinese web sites. They do this through their own toolbar (spyware) distribution attempts and partial dns partnerships. It’s hard to say how legimate exactly are those rankings, but here are a few ways to do your own due diligence:

A service similar to Google Trends (english), Baidu Index uses the number of web searches and News references (on its own site) to compute an index and generate graph which shows the popularity of a specific term.

Although some might question how important Yahoo Search statistics are in China, with its minor 6% share, Yahoo Buzz still remains a 3rd largest search engine and thus is important to consider (especially with its ownership of Alibaba and that segment of customers). It also provies automatic statistics for related keywords:

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