Google has rebranded itself as "Gu Ge" - or "Harvesting Song" - in China, a move it says demonstrates its commitment to its controversial entry into the country.

Last year Google followed arch rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft to enter the rapidly growing Chinese market through its Google.cn site. It was fiercely criticised for doing so on Beijing's terms and for blocking searches on its sites for sensitive subjects such as "Taiwan" or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

At a conference in Beijing, Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt said: "We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one."

He added that the Gu Ge name, pronounced goo-ger which Google says draws on Chinese rural traditions to describe a fruitful experience, showed how serving China's expanding internet community was the his "No1 priority".

Google said in a statement: "The name conveys the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way."

Commenting on the massive growth of the Chinese online advertising, Mr Schmidt told Reuters: "I don’t know where [Chinese] revenue growth will be, but it will obviously be large."

Google would have 100 software engineers in China by the middle of this year, he added. Asked how many the company ultimately planned to have, he said: "Eventually thousands."

The attraction of Chinese cyberspace and its massive pool of potential consumers for America's internet giants has long been clear.

A recent report from Sohu.com, China's largest web portal, suggested that China has now surpassed the United States in internet usage

Dr Charles Zhang, the company's chief executive, said there are at least 150 million Chinese internet users, and there could be as many as 200 million.

According to Nielsen NetRatings, the web analysts, the US had 154 million active users in January 2006.

Google's first significant investment in China took the form of a 5 per cent stake in Baidu, a leading Chinese search engine. But senior Google executives admitted that the small share did not given the company enough purchase in the country.

It has been suggested that Google could use part of its $10 billion cash pile to extend its operations to reach China’s growing number of online consumers.

Does Google's decision to adapt its brand to the Chinese market signal the company's departure from its founding values? Have your say here.

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