Google earnings soar 38%

Google posted quarterly sales and profit that trumped Wall Street expectations Thursday, boosted by a rebounding advertising market.The search giant's net income was $1.96 billion, or $6.06 per share, in the first quarter, up 38% from $1.42 billion from the same period last year

Excluding one-time charges, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company earned $2.18 billion in the first quarter, or $6.76 per share, up from $1.64 billion a year earlier. That easily beat analysts expectations, which called for earnings of $6.60 per share.

New Google tool spotlights requests for user data

In what it calls a stand against online censorship, Google has created a tool that will let users know how often governments around the world ask the company to pass on user data or delete content from its search results and other services.
The search giant's new Government Requests tool also publicly tracks how many of the requests Google has honored.

So which government tops the chart? So far that's Brazil, which asked Google for user information 3,663 times and sent 291 content removal requests in the last six months of 2009. Google says it honored 83% of Brazil's removal requests.
The company's removal compliance rate varies widely. For example, it honored 94% of the 188 requests it got from Germany's government agencies but only 44% of the 16 requests Canada sent over.
The United States is hot on Brazil's tail, sending Google 3,580 requests for user data and 123 removal requests. More than half of those targeted content on Google's YouTube video site. Google says it complied with 81% of the U.S. requests.

Google

Top 50 rank: 2
Rank in Internet Services and Retailing: 1
(Previous rank: 1)
Overall score: 7.70

Google's privacy challenge

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- When dealing with privacy, Google often finds itself walking a tightrope.
After all, the company's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Sticking with that mission while guarding your privacy needs can put Google in quite a pickle.

"Our mission statement inherently leads to privacy being an issue for us, and we want to acknowledge that" said Mike Yang, managing product counsel for Google. "The underlying rationale for most companies is to keep the minimum amount of data on hand about its users, but our company's business model relies on data."

Google may leave China soon

EW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Google appears to be getting closer to shutting down its strictly monitored search engine in China, according to news reports.

The reports, which cited people close to the situation, indicate that Google advertisers in China are being advised to switch over to rival Baidu Inc., out of fears that Google could abandon the country. 

Following a targeted cyber attack on Gmail accounts emanating from China in December, Google announced on Jan. 12 that it intended to give all of its users open access to the Internet.

Google has since been negotiating with the Chinese government, as such a move would clash with China's censorship laws. Those laws forbid access to Internet sites that criticize the government, display pornography or promote certain religious material.

A Simple Solution For Google In China

Richard StiennonBio
Stiennon has been a white hat hacker for PricewaterhouseCoopers, VP Security Research at Gartner, and an executive at Webroot Software and Fortinet, Inc. He is founder and Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest.  

The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that: