Recently, Google has been redirecting mainland Chinese users to the Hong Kong search engine to allow access to unfiltered search.  The Chinese government, however, is no longer accepting the redirect and has asked Google to put an end to it all. Should Google refuse, China will not renew the Internet Content Provider license and that means Google must shut down Google.cn for good.

To tackle this problem, Google is planning to redirect a small percentage of mainland China users to a landing page on Google.cn which will link to Google.com.hk.

According to Google, “this approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page…As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China. It’s why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China.”

The Chinese government has yet to speak out about the new strategy and if they do not like the idea, it may be the end of Google in China.  Currently, mainland Chinese users can only search for certain topics, but cannot access the websites that come up on results pages.  Google continues to stand behind its commitment to making information available to everyone, but China’s push towards censorship is continuing to present challenges for Google.

Google

A couple of days ago Google quietly added a new feature to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard. It is actually an improvement to an existing feature, the Top Search Queries table.

Previously, the Top Search Queries table listed keywords, and the average position in which the keyword appeared over a given period of time (selectable through a dropdown menu). With these new changes, there is now a wealth of information about those keywords:

- Impressions: The number of times your site appeared on a search page when a particular keyword search was conducted.
- Click-through: The click-through rate (CTR) for the keyword listed in the table.
- Position: The position in which a keyword appeared in the results. Note: if the result was beyond the first page listing, only the page number appears.
- Pages: The page which ranked for a particular keyword.

This is truly an amazing amount of information that Google had decided to provide through the Webmaster Tools. Not only does this provide useful information as to rankings and the activity happening on the search engine result pages (SERPs), it also gives some insight into how the Google algorithm works.

Google announced on Monday, March 22^nd, that Google Maps will be experimenting with displaying hotel rates in its local business listings.

With this feature, users will be able to enter a date and the number of nights the user plans to stay at a particular hotel property and see actual prices on selected listings. The price-list will also include other websites who have provided pricing information for that particular hotel.

“This new feature will not change the way that hotels are ranked in Google Maps. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors, regardless of whether there is an associated price.

While we’re experimenting with this feature, we’re currently working with a limited number of advertisers and it will only be visible to a small portion of users . As always, we’ll evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of this new feature based on both data and feedback, and hope to make it available to more users and offer prices from more partners over time.”

Read the complete post on the Google Lat Long Blog