Earlier this year, Spain’s data protection authority (DPA) had asked Google to remove nearly one-hundred articles from search results. The articles threatened the privacy of the subjects mentioned and complaints were generated.

In the name of freedom of expression, Google has been determined to fight against Spain’s orders. Now, the case has been turned to the European court of justice, “which will offer guidance on whether Spain’s demands comply with European law – potentially setting a controversial precedent for Internet publishing in the country.” (The Guardian).

The high courts will need to decide if Google should remove the links to the articles in popular newspapers such as El País. Google believes that the publishers of the articles should be questioned rather than the search engine itself. However, Spanish authorities believe that the only way to keep the public from accessing private material is to rule against major search engines. The final outcome in this race for freedom of expression has yet to be determined.

Yesterday, Google introduced “Place Search” as part of their dedication to improving relevant results for local search.  Place Search organizes search results around specific locations so that users can get all the information they need and compare places more easily.

According to Google, the new Place Search will be “dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. [Google will] automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names.”

One of the major changes is the way the results page looks: only local results take up the page, the map has moved to the right, there are reviews of places along with images and relevant third party sites are clustered with the listings. Google will automatically provide results for obvious queries, but a new “Places” mode is available if Google does not know when users want local information.

Now that Place Search provides only local businesses on the first page, this makes it harder for third party publishers to be on the first page unless they are featured in the clusters that appear with each listing.  Those businesses that depend on organic listings may need to make some important changes in order to be fully optimized for Google’s Place Search.

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/place-search-faster-easier-way-to-find.html

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.