In what must be one of the biggest global internet industry stories for some time, Google announced on its blog that it was considering pulling its google.cn domain, due to privacy and human right concerns.

What triggered this off was a security compromise at google.cn HQ recently, where hackers attempted to gain entry into the Gmail servers that house the accounts of human right activists. Despite the fact that the hacks were unsuccessful, Google concluded that they were coming from the Chinese government, and were greatly displeased.

Google's response to this has been to suspend its censorship on its google.cn domain, something that Google has wanted to do since day one, but have always felt the need to placate the Chinese authorities, and go for the cash. Now, with the security breach attempted, Google are bowing down to China no longer and are saying, "Ban us if you like."

It’s a clever move by Google. They are asserting themselves against a regime that is known for human rights abuses, but by doing this they are offering the Chinese government a choice they probably don't want to make - to ban Google.

China most likely likes to keep Google live in its country, but under their terms; it makes them look like they are a free country, accepting of western influences. Without Google, they could damage their reputation amongst the international community, and be seen as a fascist and illiberal regime.

It remains to see whether Beijing calls Google's bluff and deprives the world's leading search engine operations in the world's largest country.

Google Rolls Out Cookie Based Personalised Search

At the start of December Google introduced mass market personalised search. Previously, Google had enabled personalised search only for those that had a Google account, and had enabled Google to access their search history.

Now, personalised search is opt-out for everyone that uses Google, meaning that you have to actively sign out from the system to not let Google access your search history. The process is also cookie based, which means that every time you use Google, the search engine plants a small piece of code on your PC; when you revisit the site, Google reads the cookie and has access to your previous search history. The cookie lasts 180 days, so it’s not permanent.

This move toward cookie based opt out personalised search has raised privacy issues with some; they feel that Google is giving itself automatic access to your data, and is making yet another move towards world domination. However, Google has defended itself against these arguments, saying that users are free to opt out at any time.

Perhaps the biggest implications of mass personalisation is in SEO. Whereas personalisation was previously limited to users with a Google account, now it’s on a mass scale. This makes the problems of most users having a different set of search results all the more real; the fact of mass personalisation makes SEO less important. How can you justify spending money on SEO when each person's rankings are different?

The answer here could be that there will always be a need for some SEO, it just may be reduced in effect slightly. After all, users are always going to need recommendations for things they have never searched for before.

My guess is that SEO is going to have to change and adapt quite cleverly if it is going to survive as an industry