09/29/2004

Google Responds to the controversy about Google news China

Post @ 19:07 in

There are huge debates on Google's new version of Chinese language news service 1, 2. Google had post a formal response to accusations that the company has censored news sources. Some Chinese blogger says it's a meaningless and weak explain, also Keso had translated this piece of response into Chinese.

There has been controversy about our new Google News China edition, specifically regarding which news sources we include. For users inside the People’s Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country.
This was a difficult decision for Google, and we would like to share the factors we considered before taking this course of action.

Actually Google News also got a lot of different debates recently,

Some people seem to think that the Google News algorithm is serving better political play and supportive articles for George W. Bush on searches for “Bush” than they do for John Kerry on searches for well, “Kerry.”

Also Wired editor Adam L. Penenberg had a article discussed Google News "beta" strategy:

So while other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.