In China, These Detectives Aren't for Hire

Google will give users a choice in hopes to appease Beijing

(AP) - Google will stop automatically rerouting users of its China search site to its Hong Kong site, the company said today, after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license. Instead of automatically being switched to Hong Kong, visitors to Google.cn now see a tab that says in Chinese "We have moved to google.com.hk." "They made it clear to us that they did not think the redirect was acceptable," said a Google spokeswoman. She declined to say what reasons the government gave for its objections. More»

Some fear official tolerance is surveillance in disguise

(NEWSER) - The usually repressive Chinese government has been surprisingly tolerant of—and even responsive to—a wave of Internet petitions protesting local injustices and corruption. Online campaigns have gotten accused killers freed, officials fired, and charges dropped against a motorist who cut off his own finger to protest police entrapment, then publicized the deed. “This is the era of disguised accountability,” one professor tells the Washington Post, "holding officials accountable by relying on the Internet rather than on traditional means like elections and the checks by the Congress." More»

(NEWSER) - China darkened Google for 2 hours today over the site’s continued practice of returning results linking to foreign websites and “pornographic” content, the Financial Times reports. The Chinese government is unhappy that Google’s domestic website, Google.cn, allows users to search the entirety of the Internet. The outage affected only Google.com, the only way to access Gmail in China and a prime target for advertisers. More»

(NEWSER) - Yahoo today restated its opinion that Microsoft’s $44.6 billion buyout bid underestimates the online giant’s “combination of unique assets,” but for the first time stated publicly the strengths it would bring to the Microsoft merger, MarketWatch reports. In an investor presentation for the SEC, the company argued it would take Microsoft "from sub-scale position to strong positions in search and display." More»

Language barrier keeps search engine a bit player in big market

(NEWSER) - "Google" is a verb in many dictionaries, but the challenge of pronouncing it in Chinese has spelled trouble for the planet’s biggest search engine. "G-O-O-G-L-E is not a normal Chinese spelling and people don't pronounce it right," one Google exec tells Bloomberg of China, where the company holds less than half the market share of leader Baidu. More»