The key number for New York-listed Baidu, the Chinese internet search specialist that reported second-quarter results after the market close on Wednesday, is not the Rmb1.9bn of revenues, up 74 per cent year-on-year, or the Rmb837m of net income, which has more than doubled. It is B2-20070004: the Chinese web services licence registered by Google, Baidu’s only significant search competitor.

The renewal of that licence earlier this month, after six months of wrangling, implies a working arrangement between the US company and Chinese authorities. For a while, users were automatically redirected from google.cn to unfiltered google.com.hk; they now have to click to get there. Still, the truce is uneasy. Google’s data on mainland China service availability still show frequent full or partial blockages of services such as docs and ads. Ten days ago, for example, just one of 13 services – Gmail – was considered fully accessible. “Web search suggest”, the drop-down list of related search items, has been blocked entirely since the end of June; Picasa, the photo sharing site, joined YouTube, Blogger and Google Sites on the fully blocked blacklist in March. Yes, directing users to Hong Kong means Google does not censor search results itself. But China’s great firewall kicks in nonetheless, as it does for all overseas sites. Mainland users entering banned keywords are still likely to lose their browser connections for at least 10 minutes.

This cat-and-mouse game has been great for Baidu. As advertisers fret over Google’s service availability, the US company’s share of the search market has fallen from 36 per cent to 24 over the past two quarters, according to Analysys International, while Baidu has gone from 58 to 70 per cent. Investors’ verdict seems clear. While Google has lagged behind the Nasdaq by 19 per cent this year, Baidu has outperformed it by 80. Call it the price of principles.