Good News from Google

Google's decision to end its censorship of China's branch of the Internet is a welcome development.

The original decision to launch the Great Firewall of China was widely criticised back in 2006, including on this blog.

Robert Peston, meanwhile, moves outside the financial sector to raise questions about the nature and logic of Google's announcement, here. And Global Voices has some views on Google's announcement from bloggers inside China here.

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Random Links

Tried ecocho yet?

If you were unsettled by the recent academic study by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross on the amount of CO2 generated by each Google search, ecocho may be of more than passing interest.

Powered by Yahoo, the search engine takes a portion of its ad revenue and uses it to pay for trees to be planted.

With over 6,000 trees currently planted, the site is a modest step in the right direction of helping to green the internet, a project which is currently in its infancy.

The carbon offsetting is verified by accounts KPMG and by Australia's Global Carbon Exchange.

Ecocho can be easily integrated into IE and Firefox though I found the code for embedding it into iGoogle was incomplete.

I use it most days to supplement my Google searches if I know more or less what I'm looking for and need a simple way in to the right URL.

Make sure you use the right country option on the top right of the home page and why not give it a try.

As the page says, "You search, we grow trees."

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