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Google have announced it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.

Google said the decision followed a cyber attack it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.

The move follows a clampdown on the internet in China over the last year, which has seen sites and social networking services hosted overseas blocked – including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – and the closure of many sites at home. Chinese authorities ­criticised Google for supplying “vulgar” content in results.

Google acknowledged that the decision “may well mean” the closure of Google.cn and its offices in China.

That is an understatement, given that it had to agree to censor sensitive material – such as details of human rights groups and references to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – to launch Google.cn.

Google was in contact with the US state department before its announcement. Spokesman PJ Crowley said: “Every nation has an obligation, regardless of the origin of malicious cyber activities, to keep its part of the network secure.

“That includes China. Every nation should criminalise malicious activities on computer networks.”

In a post on the official Google Blog, the company outlined a “highly sophisticated and targeted” attack in December which it believes affected at least 20 other firms: “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web, have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

Hillary Clinton stepped into the debate, urging Beijing to respond to Google’s announcement.

The US secretary of state said in a statement: “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation.”

She added: “The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.”

Source: Guardian | Picture : Unknown Source – Google China HQ sign today

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We now have a fully qualified Google Analytics Qualified individual in our team!

Oliver Yeates today passed the GAIQ exam today to prove our ability to maximise the performance of your website and can demonstrate our technical expertise in setting up the necessary tracking to monitor your website performance.

This is the latest in a range of new qualification for Clicky Media who are also now a Google AdWords Qualified Company.

View the Official Qualification here >>

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The search engine giants have recently revealed that they have now launched Ad Sitelinks. However, the feature is currently only available advertisers “whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold.”

According to Google, this new feature will “increase the choice and relevancy in search ads.” Essentially Ad Sitelinks allow advertisers to incorporate additional and deep links within paid results, much like you find in organic listings.

In the post written by Dan Friedman of the Inside AdWords crew on the official Google Adwords blog, he also commented, “Early participants in Ad Sitelinks, like Priceline.com, found that presenting multiple link options made it easier to direct users to relevant information on their sites, driving them deeper into the conversion funnel.”

Sources: Search Engine Land & Google Adwords Blog

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Google has apparently won the first leg of what appears to be a significant legal struggle against some of the world’s most recognised luxury brands as a European Union court advisor said that the search engine did not violate their trademarks.

In an interim legal judgement, Google was not found guilty of breaking trademark rights by the European court of Justice because no products or services was being sold directly to the general public.

Advocate General Poiares Maduro said in a statement that “Google has not infringed trade mark rights by allowing advertisers to buy keywords corresponding to registered trademarks”, something that French Luxury powerhouse LVMH strenuously opposes.

The fashion conglomerate claims that Google was intrinsically wrong to accept payments for the company’s many brands in its adwords advertising system. Ironically, many of those keywords generated adverts that linked to fake LVMH products.

LVMH won a legal action in France and started to sue Google over trademark infringement since June 2008; the use of trademarks in Adwords acceptable in the US and any decisions in the EU doesn’t cover the rest of the world.

Google derives significant revenue from what is essentially the name of other companies as well as trademarks and one could argue that intellectual property owners should get a cut of the profits.

Source : ITProPortal

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Speculation continues to spread within Search Marketing circles as to whether or not Yahoo and Microsoft are planning to work together in some capacity. Even following the collapse of Microsoft’s efforts to acquire Yahoo for a massive $44 billion over a year ago rumours have reignited about the two companies working together following the recent launch of microsoft’s latest Search/Decision Engine Bing. This has been further fuelled by comments made from executives from both companies.

It is now thought the pair are looking to combine to create a more effective rival to search engine giants Google. Bing is said to be set to become the search provider on Yahoo.com allowing the two companies to compete for further market share and inventory.

A recent report from AdAge suggests that a deal is likely to be announced this week and could potentially give Microsoft up to a 30% share of the international search market. According to the report the deal would be structured as below:

“Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure. The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media.”

Basically, the idea behind this would be to cut Yahoo’s costs whilst opening a much larger revenue stream. In addition, the deal would allow Microsoft the opportunity to become a bigger player in the search market.

However, this deal is far from secured and until both parties can happily agree on way to effectively work together in may take time for this arrangement to be hugely positive for the businesses. Remember, both Yahoo and Microsoft have desperately struggled to organically improve market share by any meaningful percentages over the past few years and a deal between the two is unlikely to change this insantly.

Microsoft still have to ensure that Bing is a much much better product than Google for any significant changes yet.

Source: Mashable

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