Internet Marketing

7 September 2002 China's recent blocking of Google and AltaVista has us asking whether they might be doing it for reasons that have not been mentioned in the press.

Business Internet Marketing Our proxy has not been blocked. We wonder who will block us first -- China or Google, Inc.? The former because we're a back door to Google's index, or the latter because our interface is ad-free and unauthorized by Google?

Because of concerns that the Chinese government might ask for users' personal details, Google is not offering email, chat room, or blogging services in China. Google's response to the criticism is in this Google blog entry. The other point of view is expressed in Google Responds on China; Boycott Google.

Internet Marketing Strategic U.S. intelligence agencies have recently shown a great deal of interest in Internet surveillance. One thrust of this is determining geolocation from IP number. Currently this is about 80 percent effective in fixing the IP number to a major city, and over 90 percent in fixing it to a country.

“Guge”is the name for Google’s presence in China. Guge, which means something like “valley song“ in Chinese, was chosen to show Google’s commitment to China, according to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Internet Marketing Seo Another important aspect is the search terms used to query search engines. These terms are absolute pearls; they are a succinct window into the Internet user's interests and state of mind at a particular point in time. Cluster analysis that uses geolocation along with search terms would provide an insight into a society and its subcultures.

with access to contact information, balances, - all in one simple screen in the Customer Center, Vendor Center, and Employee Center. Boost efficiency with direct access to key tasks and information from the simplified Home Page. Google Marketing Tools Google Marketing Tools offer you new ways to help attract customers easily and online. Advertise your business with Google AdWords, help customers find your business with Google Maps listings, and find buyers by making your products searchable on Google.

Ebook Internet Marketing Chinese officials may be worried that Google logs all search terms together with the IP number, a time stamp, a unique cookie ID, and browser information. If this information is available to the National Security Agency from Google -- and current U.S. laws almost require Google to provide this information to the feds, especially when the Internet user is a non-U.S. citizen in a country that's of national security interest to the U.S. -- then China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security.

April 3, Computer World Anonymizer software circumvents China's Great Firewall Chinese Internet censors take more than a week to identify and block access to sites that allow Internet users to circumvent their controls, according to a top executive at Anonymizer Inc. March 29, The Lowell Sun Acquaint yourself with Google' known shortcuts Ten years ago, "googol" graders brought home to parents.

Business Home Internet The NSA, if it gets this information straight from Google, is operating at a level of efficiency much greater than Chinese officials themselves, who must intercept and collate such information by monitoring the packet stream. This puts the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.

Like Gmail, Google Notebooks are accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. To use Google Notebooks, we need to have a Google account, of course. And we need to download a browser extension. It’s currently available only for Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 1.5+. If we make our Google Notebooks public (the default is private), other people can do Notebook searches the way they search websites.

Internet Marketing Site Web The privacy policies of search engines generally do not cover items such as IP number storage, and storage of search terms. In the case of portals that use Google results, it is important to know whether the portal forwards the IP number to Google along with the search terms. We've asked this question of several portals, and received a reply only from Netscape, which said that they do not forward the IP number to Google.

Based Business Home Internet Journalists interested in privacy can provide a service by asking search engines and portals about the user data they collect. When engines fail to reveal this, then they should at least allow proxies and meta-engines to access their index as a matter of policy and convenience to Internet users around the world. We hope our proxy can continue to operate, both in China and in the U.S.

Internet Marketing Web Geolocation links:


(May, 2003) News item: "The winner of the 2002 Google programming contest and the $10,000 prize was Daniel Egnor. Egnor's winning project allows users to search web pages based on locale. Egnor took street addresses, converted them to latitude and longitude coordinates, and then created a location index. The result was a system that allows users to focus keyword searches to an area of a specific location."

Estate Internet Marketing Real Bottom line: Geolocation is neither fad nor fantasy. It's something that must be considered when evaluating the behavior of major Web players.

Engine Internet Marketing Update, March 2003: We still don't know the story behind China's blocking and unblocking of Google. It may be that Google's acute interest in geolocation by IP number is designed primarily to sell more ads in more markets. In an article by Josh McHugh ("Google vs. Evil," Wired Magazine, January 2003), several paragraphs imply that Google worked out some sort of secret deal with Chinese authorities:
Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google's general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access. "We didn't want to do anything rash," Brin says. "The situation over there is more complex than I had imagined."

Affiliate Internet Marketing Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that happen? For starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation's 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. "Internet users in China are an apolitical crowd," says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In China. "They tend to be people who are doing well, and they don't usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom."

Consulting Internet Marketing The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in china" receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. "They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches," Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? "We didn't make changes to our servers" is all he'll say.

For hints on how Google's own censorship system works, see an article by .
Who owns that IP number? Below you can enter a single IP number to find the name of the owner. This demo also allows you to use one or two keywords for a corporation or organization that may own IP blocks, and it will show you up to 500 matches. Try entering "china province" (without the quotes) -- or, for that matter, "intelligence agency" or "enron" or "defense." Use quotation marks only if you want to force two words to appear together as one keyword, or to force a leading and/or trailing space on some initials or short words.