Employees at Google are protesting the company's work on a censored search engine for China, the New York Times reports, signing a letter that calls for more transparency and questions the move's ethics. Reports of the search engine surfaced earlier this month, leaving many to wonder how the company could justify it after publicly pulling its Chinese search engine in 2010 due to the country's censorship practices. The letter, which is circulating on Google's internal communications system, has been signed by approximately 1,000 employees, according to the New York Times' sources. "We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we're building," the letter said. It also asked the company to let employees be a part of ethics reviews and publish ethical assessments of projects that are seen as controversial.

Google's John Mueller warns site owners using meta refresh that doing so may lead to the wrong content getting indexed. That can happen because Google treats meta refresh as a redirect, meaning the page that the user ultimately lands on is the one that will get indexed. Site owners may run into problems using meta refresh in certain instances. For example, if an online store uses meta refresh to send a customer from a product listing page to a payment page. In that example, using meta refresh would be problematic because the payment page would get indexed and not the actual product page.

Following a particular news story online is an important but difficult task, as the relevant information is often scattered across different domains/sources (e.g., news articles, blogs, comments, tweets), presented in various formats and language styles, and may overlap with thousands of other stories. In this work we join the areas of topic tracking and entity disambiguation, and propose a framework named Story Disambiguation - a cross-domain story tracking approach that builds on real-time entity disambiguation and a learning-to-rank framework to represent and update the rich semantic structure of news stories. Given a target news story, specified by a seed set of documents, the goal is to effectively select new story-relevant documents from an incoming document stream. We represent stories as entity graphs and we model the story tracking problem as a learning-to-rank task. This enables us to track content with high accuracy, from multiple domains, in real-time. We study a range of text, entity and graph based features to understand which type of features are most effective for representing stories. We further propose new semi-supervised learning techniques to automatically update the story representation over time. Our empirical study shows that we outperform the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods for tracking mixed-domain document streams, while requiring fewer labeled data to seed the tracked stories. This is particularly the case for local news stories that are easily over shadowed by other trending stories, and for complex news stories with ambiguous content in noisy stream environments.

In the real world, the search is so large that we cannot enumerate the entire search engine. The digital world is so dynamic and disorganized that it has made it difficult to find an effective solution to ambiguous queries. The process of retrieval is affected by the ambiguous queries which average users type into the search engines. This is why they return too many results which can be manipulated by search engine black hat hackers. Problem: How a user can find an appropriate answer that is relevant to his/her query?

If Google is planning a search engine for China, how is it planning to obey the country's strict censorship laws from day one? The Intercept has obtained documents reportedly showing that Google has been using 265.com, a hybrid information and search portal it acquired in 2008, as a "honeypot" that would help it develop a blacklist for search terms in China. Google has supposedly been collecting info about search queries, which technically redirect to Baidu, to see if they would be censored. According to the report, Google has been using a tool nicknamed BeaconTower to see if the final destinations of these searches would survive the Great Firewall. If they didn't, Google would exclude them from the first page of results in its prototype Chinese search engine.

The Great Firewall of China is the largest-scale internet censorship operation in the world. The Chinese state says the firewall is there to promote societal harmony within an increasing population of billions of people. It considers the internet in China as part of its sovereign territory. Eight years ago, Google withdrew from China, pulling its search and other services out because of country's limits to freedom of speech. But it is now planning to relaunch a heavily censored version of its services in China, according to a whistleblower who spoke to online news website The Intercept.

After an eight-year-long absence from the most populated country in the world, Google search is going to dramatically make a comeback in China. Google is reportedly planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that is going to blacklist certain websites and search terms to comply with Chinese government's attempts to censor the Internet, a whistleblower revealed. According to leaked documents obtained by The Intercept, CEO Sundar Pichai met with a Chinese government official in December 2017 to re-enter the world's largest market for internet users. Project Dragonfly -- Censored Google Search Engine Since spring last year Google engineers have been secretly working on a project, dubbed "Dragonfly," which currently includes two Android mobile apps named--Maotai and Longfei--one of which will get launched by the end of this year after Chinese officials approve it. The censored version of Google search engine in the form of a mobile app reportedly aims to "blacklist sensitive queries" and filter out all websites (news, human rights, democracy, religion) blocked by the Chinese government, including Wikipedia, BBC News, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Google refused to confirm if it's truly been developing a censored search engine for China after reports about the project's existence came out, but it might soon have no choice but to come clean. A group of six Democratic and Republican Senators led by Marco Rubio has penned a letter addressed to Google chief Sundar Pichai demanding concrete answers. They want to know once and for all whether the tech giant is conjuring up a version of its search engine that'll work behind the Great Firewall. The Senators called the move "deeply troubling" if true, pointing out that that it "risks making Google complicit in human rights abuses related to China's rigorous censorship regime." While the company has yet to confirm the project (reportedly called "Dragonfly"), it's easy to see why the Senators would be concerned.

Google may be developing a special version of its search engine that would allow certain information to disappear in China. It would not be the first time a company has done so – and it would not even be the first time Google has done so. The decision has turned fresh attention to China's internet censorship regime, so wide-ranging that it has been labelled the "Great Firewall" and so powerful that it has allowed the government to ban people from using a single letter. The suggestion that China could be partnering with the regime has been attacked by human rights campaigners and others, who suggested that Google relenting on censorship would be a "dark day", in the words of Amnesty International. It would not be the first of such days, as Google would follow a whole host of companies including LinkedIn that already censor their users as the price of operating in China.

Google has been criticised over reports that it is working on a version of its search engine meant to hide information requested by the Chinese government. The new tool would be a way for Google to get around the vast rules that are placed on what can be shared online in the country. Google withdrew from China in 2010, amid uproar about the fact it was being forced to censor certain information. But the new plan appears to be an attempt to try and get the company back in, by making sure that censoring is happening in an agreeable way. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.