Steve Andrews's Blog

Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google China, reported that Google will acquire "one or two companies" in the country and invest in up to five more in the coming year. While the specific companies were not named in the report, the acquisitions/partnerships are thought to be a part of the search company's ongoing efforts to unseat rival Baidu.com as the country's leader in internet search. A (U.S.-based) Google representative told Wired News he couldn't confirm Lee's comments due to the time difference in Beijing. A statement is expected on Monday.

In the past, Google (or ‘Guge,’ what is to be its Chinese name brand) has made no secret of its plans for China. In fact, CEO and president Eric Schmidt said his company is off to a pretty good start already, and that "the tenacity of Google…will bring significant victories in China over the next few years."

I've found an official release from Google concering the Pagerank update. We all know that Google Pagerank Update is delayed so i thaught everybody is interested in this.

"It has come to our attention that there is a widespread outbreak of concerned webmasters talking about the future of the Google PageRank system. The delay
as many have called it of the PageRank update is nothing of the sort. There are certain circumstances that have caused the present update to take longer to propagate than past updates.

New search engine algorithm changes are taking place which have affected the PageRank update. We recommend that all webmasters and website visitors in general continue on with business as usual. The PageRank update will occur when the new algorithm changes are fully functional and pass quality assurance checks.

On a side note the new algorithm changes consist of new filters to block automated spam websites. We are also focusing on websites that blatantly sell text links with the sole intention of boosting a specific websites PageRank. There are several factors that will be used to help us determine if a website is selling text links to boost the linked websites PageRank. Websites that are flagged for selling text links will receive an immediate drop in PageRank viewable by the Google PageRank tool bar, search engine rankings will suffer and the website will be removed from our index. Most live websites that are currently going to be effected by this have already realized at least two of the penalties above. Services that offer a fee to review a website based on it's content will not be penalized for doing so as it helps the indexing process.

We recommend that you follow the Google webmaster guidelines to prevent your website from being penalized."