“So you do not even deny being anti-democratic? ”

I didn’t address it because it was a ludicrous, baseless and knee-jerk reaction to my comment. I didn’t think it was necessary to refute something so absurd. I hope that you don’t honestly think that people who think Google should be in China are automatically anti-democratic.

If you’re suggesting that my previous silence established that I was anti-democratic, you’re engaging in a fallacy called an “argument from silence.”

Google is an opportunist? Google provides their services to the entire world. The ability to do this since their inception has always existed. How could opportunism come into play here?

Have you ever thought that Google *gasp* just wants to provide a search engine to EVERYONE?

“Nonetheless it’s something completely different whether I as a person buy some cheap stuff at the super market or whether a huge multinational, one of the most powerful companies in the world supports a regime.”

So you would be saying the same thing if you were buying products made in Nazi Germany? In aggregate, individual U.S. citizens give far, far more to China than Google does.

And in what areas are they making money off Google? Lets see…uhm, taxes for their Chinese office and network infrastructure….that’s it.

By the way, your proposition results in abuse of Chinese. Using your logic, no corporations should ever do business with China, thereby depriving them of a massive amount of important imports into their country.

I am not living in a wood cabin myself so I certainly buy Chinese products, but I try to avoid them. Nonetheless it’s something completely different whether I as a person buy some cheap stuff at the super market or whether a huge multinational, one of the most powerful companies in the world supports a regime. Even if it’s just by sticking to the rules of the dictatorship.

Google only provides a service to China and the Chinese government itself could access Google in any country they wanted to (since they control the Great Firewall). In other words, they’re not providing anything the government didn’t already have. Also, it should be patently obvious that providing public services is not the same as providing special equipment.

By refusing to go to China, the ONLY thing that the Chinese government doesn’t get is some money in taxes. They already get far, far more from the numerous businesses there that do imports/exports and other business with the U.S. and other countries.

Nonetheless I don’t like you. You’re anti-democratic to the core. I don’t know where you live or why else you’re for supporting dictatorships and large corporations wielding power over the average Joe, but this point of view is just too ugly to argue with, sorry.

If you don’t like democracy go to Birma or North Korea.

Google had to support the Chines regime, like IBM had to support the nazis! Get a history book pal. I lived once in a dictatorship and had to flee my country so don’t tell me about corporations having to support bloody regimes.

It’s ironic that SEO professionals don’t want people to underestimate the difficulty of their job, but they continually underestimate (e.g. “they changed something to have bad results, they are so incompetent”) the much more complex algorithms worked on by Google’s experts.

Google continually updates its algorithms in an attempt to, among other things, eliminate spam and search engine deception tactics. At worst, it’s a bad experiment in terms of tweaking (they have tweaked a lot) and at best, it’s making a little trade off to eliminate more spam.

PageRank is hardly a panacea. A smart search engine will employ a variety of different methods. Moving beyond just PageRank isa good thing. While the current incarnation *might* be bad (there’s not much evidence of it–just cherry picking–no listing of how many spam sites it droppped), they are continual

And the China thing? To say they abused the Chinese is absurd beyond belief. They were FORCED to censor their search results, and if they didn’t, no one in China would have access to their search engine at all. A boycott would not sway the very stubborn, controlling and fascists government–they’ll use their existing Chinese search engines instead. A boycott means that they have access to no Google, now THAT is abuse, if anything in this issue is.