Google “Changing the World”

Google officially became a teenager today. The search engine that became synonymous with search and the “don’t be evil” motto has now been part of the Internet experience for 13 years. The company was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page, now 28, and Sergey Brin, now 27. Each was a Stanford University PhD candidate in computer science. They received financing from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield &Byers and Sequoia Capital, as well as Stanford and others.

Now, research is showing that Google’s auction methodology, invented internally and so important for its success, is far more innovative than auction experts once believed. While superficially similar to earlier types of auctions, it is a “novel mechanism” that “emerged in the wild,” write the authors of The High Price of Internet Keyword Auctions, a new study by Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University, Michael Ostrovsky of Stanford University, and Michael Schwarz of the University of California at Berkeley. Google’s AdWords became so successful after its debut four years ago that some of its key features were quickly adopted by Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO ), then the search-ad leader.

In Jan 2010, Google announced that they and other US tech companies had been hacked and that Google is no longer willing to censor searches in China and may pull out of the country. On March 23, 2010 at 3 am Hong Kong Time , Google started to redirect all search queries from Google.cn to Google.com.hk. (Google Hong Kong), thereby bypassing Chinese regulators and allowing uncensored Simplified Chinese search results. As a special entity recognized by international treaty, Hong Kong is vested with independent judicial power and not subject to most Chinese laws, including those requiring the restriction of free flow of information and censorship of internet materials.

Since announcing its intent to comply with Internet censorship laws in the People’s Republic of China, Google China had been the focus of controversy over what critics view as capitulation to the “Golden Shield Project”. Because of its self-imposed censorship, whenever people searched for prohibited Chinese keywords on a blocked list maintained by the PRC government, google.cn displayed the following at the bottom of the page (translated): In accordance with local laws, regulations and policies, part of the search result is not shown. Some searches, such as (as of June 2009) “Tank Man” were blocked entirely, with only the message “Search results may not comply with the relevant laws, regulations and policy, and can not be displayed” appearing.

Google China serves a market of mainland Chinese Internet users that was estimated in July 2009 to number 338 million.[15] This estimate is up from 45.8 million in June 2002, according to a survey report from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released on June 30, 2002. A CNNIC report published a year and a half earlier, on January 17, 2001, estimated that the mainland Chinese Internet user base numbered 22.5 million people; this was considerably higher than the number published by Iamasia, a private Internet ratings company. The first CNNIC report, published on October 10, 1997, estimated the number of Chinese internet users at fewer than 650 thousand people.

Although Google did not explicitly accuse the Chinese government of the breach, it said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, and that it will discuss over the next few weeks “the basis on which we could run an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. “Google.cn transiently turned off its search result filtering. However, the filtering was later re-enabled without any acknowledgment or explanation; search queries in Chinese on the keywords Tiananmen or June 4, 1989 returned censored results with the standard censorship footnote.

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