Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Google leaves China - What does this mean?

In todays news and discussion about Google leaving China, nobody seems to have dug into what that actually means.  Does that mean closing a physical office and laying off some employees? Yes. I saw that in was estimated that $300M in revenue, roughly 1% of Google's revenues, would be lost.  How?

I googled Google China and found, in addition to an official statement by Google, that there is a google.cn which means a Google search engine for China.  I suppose they spider all the .cn domains and provide them as preferred results on searches conducted from .cn sites.

But, if a person in the US using Google.com googles using Chinese characters or another search which is best served by providing a web page in China, will Google still provide them in their results? Or are they going to completely stop spidering anything with the .cn suffix.  Now what about searches that originate inside China but go to Google.com, will they be completed or will they be shut down too?




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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous6:40 PM

    Just input some facts here.

    1. GFW will block all request from inside China to www.Google.com. From inside, you can only access google.cn

    2. Closing google.cn means no access to all google services.

    3. it has nothing to do with spidering .cn sufix, it is the filter in "results".

    If you want to know more about the politics went on at the other side of the globe, I suggest reading www.danwei.com, a news site about China which can not be accessed from inside(of China).

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