Ordinarily, taking your Web site offline or removing its content is pretty high on the list of ways to damage its prominence in Google search results.

But Google has granted a special exemption during the protests today of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Many in the tech realm despise the proposed legislation and are protesting it with blackened, content-free sites.

Pierre Far, a Webmaster trends analyst at Google, offered an assurance that SOPA protests today won't cause problems with Googlebot, the system Google uses to constantly examine the Web's content and structure.

"We realize many Web … Read more

The European Union could make a decision as early as March on whether or not it'll file a formal antitrust complaint against Google, according to a news report.

"I will receive comments from the case team towards the end of the first quarter," European Competition Commission Joaquin Almunia told Reuters in an interview published today. "I do not expect anything sooner. Let us see."

The fact that the European Union could come to a decision so soon after launching an investigation is somewhat surprising. In the vast majority of antitrust cases, the EU can take … Read more

Google and China have had a strained relationship over the years, but now, the search giant is trying to smooth things over a bit.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which sat down with Daniel Alegre, Google's top executive in China, the search company is looking to make a range of moves to expand its presence in China, including hiring more engineers and product managers, and introducing a range of new services to the country's consumers.

Interestingly, Google wants to focus on services that don't require government-imposed censorship. Alegre told the Journal that such services might include … Read more

Microsoft has finally won second place among search engines.

Carving out 15.1 percent of the market in December, Bing narrowly outstripped the 14.5 percent share eked out by Yahoo, according to data released yesterday by market researcher ComScore.

Of course, Google still led the search engine market with a whopping 65 percent share.

But December was the first month in which Microsoft outshone its competitor and partner Yahoo, according to a Citi analyst cited by TechCrunch. As always, ComScore's numbers include only explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page.

Under the hood, Microsoft … Read more

Google has dropped the "incoming" stream of posts from Google+, saying the feature was confusing, rarely used, and obsolete.

The incoming stream showed posts from people who followed you but whom you didn't follow. Google+ Engineering Manager Dave Besbris announced the end of the incoming stream in a Google+ post last night:

The "Incoming" stream was a part of Google+ from the very start and it served an important purpose at the time to help people discover others on Google+. Since then however we've added a suggested user list, What's Hot, the ability … Read more

Google stepped into trouble when it announced yesterday it's personalizing search results with Google+ information.

The move incurred Twitter's wrath and raised the prospect of yet another grueling round of antitrust scrutiny.

But Google had no choice.

It has choices about how exactly to make what it calls Search plus Your World work. Google can change how it presents search results derived from social services. It can change what services it chooses to listen to. It can offer different actions that people can take when seeing social information. It can give people different controls over how exactly their … Read more

Can't decide which TV, camera, or car to buy? Advice from friends too unreliable? Advice from expert reviewers (hello!) too soft? If you're the kind of person who likes to make purchase decisions based only on rigorous research, you might love Sortable.

Sortable is a product selection service that enables you to filter and sort a list of products based on criteria it extracts from published data. If you're looking for a camera, you can specify your price range, and then drill in by camera type, by brand, by video capability, and so on, down to some … Read more

A Google effort to promote its Chrome browser misfired with the appearance of some blog posts that fly in the face of Google's own attempts to discourage low-quality Web content.

The campaign, spotted yesterday by Aaron Wall at SEOBook, is apparent in several blog posts from late December bearing the label, "This post is sponsored by Google Chrome." But there appears to be some backtracking now that the campaign is under scrutiny, and Google itself is disclaiming responsibility while trying to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The theme of the posts is evident in their titles: &… Read more

Google is taking heat from travel companies that say the search engine is giving preferential treatment to its own travel search tools over those of competitors.

The Wall Street Journal today points to a practice begun by the search giant earlier this month, which provides results for travel-related searches--such as domestic flights--from right within Google, as opposed to pointing searchers towards places like Priceline, Expedia, and Orbitz.

The move poses a serious threat, the Journal says, for these competing travel sites, which can depend on Google for 10 percent to 20 percent of their incoming traffic. With the newer technique … Read more