Impact Media's SEO Blog

Following Google’s very public fallout with the Chinese Government they remain surprisingly unscathed. Their rivals on the other hand are enduring travails aplenty in the aftermath; so who exactly has come out of this scandal worse?

Whilst Google are reporting ‘business as usual’ behind the bamboo curtain, ascertaining how true that actually is can’t be done without delving deep into the realms of speculation. What we do know though is that Yahoo! have received a severe reprimand from their own Chinese counterparts, Alibaba, for seemingly siding with their search rivals in the Chinese hacking scandal. Likewise, Microsoft have been singled out for blame due to a flaw within their Internet Explorer browser that allowed Google to be hacked; an issue that has subsequently led the French and German Governments to suggest that their respective citizens abandon the Internet browser in favour of the various alternatives available.

So whilst Google have been at loggerheads with the Chinese authorities and threatening a withdrawal from the country [see: Google Threatens China Walkout], their search rivals have done little to steal the initiative. Of course it is all hypothetical at this point, but Yahoo! appear to have dug themselves a bit of a hole by siding with Google – not least with the aforementioned Alibaba – and Microsoft could lose more ground with their browser’s blacklisting in Europe.
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly slammed state intrusion determining how civilians use the Internet. In the report by The Telegraph, Schmidt claims that “if they don’t listen to us it is at their peril” – very ominous indeed; which serves as a thinly veiled attack on governments throughout the world, most notably Iran and China, who have decided to step in and filter what can be searched for.

The importance of the Internet in the creation and subsequent proliferation of news has come into focus in recent weeks. Ordinarily secretive states with little or no foreign journalistic contact, have had their barriers smudged by increasing numbers of videos and messages from within their own populous. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have been right at the cutting edge of this distribution; a process that has invariably also involved the world’s most popular search engine, Google.
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