There was of course all that trouble with Google in China in which Google agreed to censor its Chinese search engine (google.cn.) results to comply with the Communist regimes truth suppression laws ..... this somewhat dented the image of the Internet giant. However the relationship with the Chinese has cooled dramatically after a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating from the country attacked the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google stopped censoring results by redirecting all search queries from Google.cn to Google.com.hk to bypass censorship.
A few 'doubting thomases' have suggested that Google, having found themselves in second place in the search engine stakes to Chinese search engine 'Baidu' (a copycat clone of the Google site), which held more than 60% of the market (Google had only 31%), was looking for an out of the mainland China market, and regaining its morals was a convenient way in which to 'not be evil'.
Now however a researcher who has accused Google of bias in its search results says the Internet giant is now waging a campaign to discredit him ...... Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, had published a study this week claiming Google boosts its own products in search results which is of course 'being evil'.
Google have responded by claiming he was actually working on behalf of its rival, Microsoft "Mr Edelman is a longtime paid consultant for Microsoft, so it's no surprise that he would construct a highly biased test that his sponsor would pass and that Google would fail," it said.
.... but we may be on the edge of big problems for Google as in November last year, the European Commission announced that it was launching an investigation into whether the company was abusing its dominance and also last year, the attorney general of Texas said he was looking at claims that Google manipulates results to boost its own products and therefore make more profit.
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