Google search using speed to rank sites

Google web search rankings are now partly affected by a site’s speed, the company has announced on the same day as it reveals its first UK acquisition.

Google search results are now being based partly on a website’s speed, the company has announced. Previously, ranking was purely based on the relevance of a site to the terms a user searched for, but the system has been adjusted after Google studies found that site visitors discriminated against slow web pages.

The search giant said, however, that only a very small number of sites would be affected. Writing on the company’s Webmaster Central Blog, engineers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote that “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1 per cent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.” The blog post also emphasised the importance of speed for web users and provided links to tools that site owners could use to speed up their web pages.

The news came on the same day that Google announced it had bought Plink, a two person start-up based in Cambridge. The company works on visual search, and its first application, PlinkArt, identified a painting if a user took a photograph of it using their camera phone.

Founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin will now go to work on Google’s Goggles visual search application. Google added that the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, marked the start of an ambition to buy one firm a month.

Google to stop censoring China search results

Violation of the commitment it had made, says Beijing

Washington DC/Beijing: Google Inc. on Monday evening announced that it would stop censoring the results of its search engine in China. The move follows Google’s allegations of cyber-attacks by China in January — which the Chinese government denied — and subsequent testimonies on the matter by Google, to the United States Congress.

Since Google stopped censoring its results, users visiting Google.cn were being redirected to Google.com.hk, the company said, where uncensored search in simplified Chinese was on offer. “This website was specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong,” said Google.

A search for “Tiananmen Square protests of 1989” on Google.com.hk returned extensive search results for Internet users on China. However, the users were unable to open many of these websites and according to reports searches in Chinese returned no results but only the message, “The connection was reset.”

In a statement Google said evidence it uncovered during its investigation into cyber attacks suggested Google E-mail accounts of “dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties.”

The announcement said Google was unwilling to tolerate these attacks and attempts to further limit free speech on the web in China — including the blocking of social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blogger — and that it would therefore not continue censoring results on Google.cn.

Chinese officials attacked the Internet giant for violating the commitment it had made, when it first launched Google.cn in 2006. “Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” said an unnamed official at the Internet governing authority at the State Council Information Office told State-run Xinhua news agency. However, Google’s decision was welcomed by bloggers and rights activists in China, who said the move would help bring more awareness to Chinese Internet users about the government’s censorship policies.

“Chinese people want a free Internet, but many are not even aware of what information is being restricted by the government. The fact that they will now be exposed to more information, even if they cannot accessit, is a big change in of itself,” well-known Chinese blogger Michael Anti told The Hindu.

In the statement, Google confirmed that it would continue research and development work in China and maintain its sales presence.