More than a dozen human rights groups have sent a letter to Google urging the company not to offer censored internet search in China, amid reports it is planning to again begin offering the service in the giant Asian market. The joint letter dated Tuesday calls on CEO Sundar Pichai to explain what Google is doing to safeguard users from the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance. It describes the censored search engine app, codenamed "Dragonfly", as representing "an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights. "The Chinese government extensively violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy; by accommodating the Chinese authorities' repression of dissent, Google would be actively participating in those violations for millions of internet users in China," said the letter That follows a letter earlier this month signed by more than a thousand Google employees protesting the company's secretive plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese ...

President Trump thinks Google's search engine is "rigged." By featuring more mainstream news outlets and relatively fewer conservative sites in the results he sees, Trump tweeted Tuesday, Google is "suppressing" right-wing views on its platform. Trump escalated his attacks Tuesday afternoon in remarks from the Oval Office, warning that "Google and Twitter and Facebook, they are treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful." It's easy to see how Trump arrived at this conclusion, because in many ways his experience mirrors that of millions of Americans who've awoken to the dominance of Google -- and Facebook, and Twitter -- in their everyday lives without being quite certain how it wound up there. We rely constantly on Google to find out what to buy, which restaurants to eat at and how to get from one place to another.

More than a dozen human rights groups and other advocacy organizations urged Google to abandon any plans to build a censored version of its search engine in China. The project, said to be referred to internally as Dragonfly, 'would represent an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights,' argued a letter signed by 14 groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders. The letter is addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and comes after weeks of internal revolt at the company, wherein employees have expressed outrage over the firm's rumored plans to launch a censored search engine in China. While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security.

President Donald Trump is talking about the Iowa college student that was found slain about a month after she disappeared, despite the victim's family asking that her death not be politicized. President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Charleston, W.Va. Tuesday. WASHINGTON – White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is considering new regulations on Google's search engine to address his concern that it turns up too many stories that are critical of him. Pressed by reporters at the White House on Tuesday about a tweet the president wrote criticizing Google's search engine as "rigged," the director of Trump's National Economic Council said the administration is "taking a look" at federal regulations for the company. "We'll let you know," he said.

Paid and organic search work together like peanut butter and jelly: on their own they are okay, but together they make magic! When it comes to PPC vs. SEO, there is only one strategy winner: integrating both. The key to any optimization strategy lies in the data. In this post, we will quickly take you through linking your Google Ads and Search Console accounts and accessing the right reports to access the insights of both, to optimize your organic and paid search strategy for peak performance. In short, following these three short steps will give you additional organic data in your AdWords reports, which you can then use to improve your organic reach as well as your search ad performance.

While shopping ads are arguably the most important form of Google advertising for e-commerce accounts, you're missing an opportunity if you ignore regular search ads. Text ads for specific product searches still take up a lot of real estate and can help drive more sales. When I'm preparing to write text ads, I like to see what's currently in the landscape. You know what makes me really happy? Why am I happy with those search results?

Most common PPC campaign mistakes can be easily rectified. With extra awareness, time and effort, you can adjust your optimization strategy to focus on ROI instead of CPA and get better results. With some changes to the way you approach your PPC activities as a whole, you can fine-tune your funnel and get higher-quality conversions. PPC marketers are only human, after all, but by avoiding some common campaign mistakes, you can become a number-crunching PPC machine. Want to know if you make the PPC grade?

Earlier this month, the Intercept broke the news that Google was building a secret program called Dragonfly, a censored search engine the company was potentially hoping to bring to China. Unlike the Google search that's used in the rest of the world, this search engine would block websites that are banned by the Chinese government and would not answer certain questions that the Chinese government has blacklisted. To learn more about Dragonfly, I recently spoke with Ryan Gallagher, a U.K.-based investigative journalist who reports on digital security and state surveillance issues for the Intercept. In our conversation, part of this week's episode of Slate's technology podcast If Then, we discussed why Google wants so desperately to enter China, why many of its employees oppose the plan, and how even a co-founder of the company may have been kept in the dark as Dragonfly was developed. Gallagher detailed how Google CEO Sundar Pichai has had several highly secretive meetings with the Chinese government about bringing Google to China over the past year--and the timeline of Google's plans to deploy the project once Beijing gave the green light.

The component parts of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy may have remained relatively constant, but their definition and purpose have changed entirely. Driven by trends like visual search and voice search, the industry's scope has expanded and evolved into something more dynamic. This delivers on a genuine consumer need. According to a report from Slyce.it, 74 percent of shoppers report that text-only search is insufficient for finding the products they want. It is unsurprising that Gartner research predicts that by 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by as much as 30 percent.

The rise of the machine has freed ICIJ members globally to pore over millions of documents in a custom-built search engine. But even this next-level research has posed substantial challenges: for example, what to do when certain phrases return an indigestible 150,000 results? Clearly, the next step to speeding up our research was to intelligently filter information relevant to each investigation. Here's how we streamlined the previously daunting process, giving us both unprecedented flexibility and the required search success rate. In leaks like the Paradise Papers, we dealt with millions of documents (including PDFs, photos, and emails) that traditional platforms like Excel can't process.