Google can never be number one in China, but it can stay number one in the West – where is needs to now focus its concentration given the rise of rival Microsoft.

Baidu is pretty much putting it to Google. The Beijing-based search engine dominates in China and has a market share of 77%. Google’s share is a mere 17%.

Is Google using the recent cyber attacks as an excuse to pull out of a market where it knows it can never be number one?

Baidu boasts more than 740 million web pages, 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files. By comparison, Google has more than one trillion web pages and billions of images. So what’s the cause of this disparity?

Google came to the Chinese market in 2006 (selling a stake it owned in Baidu tp pursue its own agenda). Baidu has been around since 2000. That’s a lot of time to get a head start, especially when Google is continuing to struggle with the Chinese government regulations.

The search engine king stated in 2008 that it was aiming to expand in China as the economy was booming and many western brands looked to cash in. But over the past year, its efforts have been hindered by censorship and Chinese loyalty as well as the effects of the worldwide financial crisis.

Its ambitions in China, though, go beyond the traditional online advertising and search – the company is still believed to be looking for multiple ways to introduce its Android platform in the region, despite the fact that Baidu has teamed up with China Mobile in a bid to also capture the mobile internet market.

How Google fares in China now will tell us a lot about what the company is made of since it is one of the few places where it will need to fight from behind rather than defend from the top. But has it lost its drive and patience for the Chinese market?

These recent cyber attacks certainly aren’t the first the search engine has encountered.  Google’s Gmail went down for several hours last year in three separate major service disruptions.

The outages prompted commentators to suggest that users may soon switch to Microsoft’s new Bing.

And therein lies my point, Google has bigger problems than competing with Baidu in China. Its main focus at the moment is protecting its market share in the west and its leading position over both Yahoo and Microsoft.

It has already spent the last six months bolstering its advertising efforts, launching its first global advertising campaign, and ensuring new revenues by entering the mobile phone and consumer markets. It has also investing heavily in improving its search business for advertisers.

China is simply not the search giant’s highest priority at this point – a time of heavy competition in search.  And it wouldn’t be unreasonable to hypothesize that Google is using the recent hackings in China as a cover to get out of a market where it knows it can never dominate.