Having lived in China for years, I am highly sceptical of any foriegner's chance at conquering the Chinese search engine market. (For multiple reasons, first because noone else knows Chinese like a native Chinese speaker, and second because from what I understand it is technically illegal for a foriegner to start an internet based buisness in China, so you could not even hire Chinese locals to help you.[Although there are supposed to be several ways around this, including opening your buisness in Hong Kong with a rep office in the mainland, or opening a consulting buisness in China that 'consults' your search engine and helps them run their China operations.)
However I would give you a much higher chance of conquering the English-speaking market in China (expats, edjucated Chinese, etc.) who are afraid that Google will suddenly be blocked from under them, or after Google does finally get blocked from under them.
Yes, this is pretty much why I haven't done anything. Is there anything in particular you can suggest for appealing to the English-speaking market in China?
There are a bunch of websites that are frequented by expats in various parts of China (like gokunming.com), so any kind of advertising, either through forum posts or traditional ads might get you some trafic. But apart from that I can not think of anything easily done to advertise to the English-speakers in China.
I think at this point if you were willing to hire 5 or 6 Chinese Twitter users to retweet lots of things in addition to advertisements to Duck Duck Go you could basically take over Chinese Twitter. Twitter is now the place of choice for Chinese semi-dissidents and the habitual use of the retweet function seems to provide them with plausible deniability.
