We live in a time of rapid technological and political change. Groundbreaking technologies give more people more access to information than ever before. Citizens have the means to broadcast their ideas to the world with the click of a few buttons. And increased adoption of the Internet by citizens and political and media leaders have made our public dialogue more diverse than ever before. Amidst all this change, the question of, " What is Democracy ",

Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads? The short answer is no. The long answer is a bit more convoluted. But so long as they are... well branded well funded operating at scale good at public relations wrapped in AdSense ads ...the answer is yes, autogenerated websites full of scraped content are fine.* *based on Mahalo.com Mahalo SEO Spam Case Study The Sales Pitch & Launch Originally when launching Mahalo,

Hakia has launched NoBrandSearch.com , a site where you can enact your own battle of the search engines and find out which one you like the best. This is what hakia says about the tool: "NoBrandSearch is an experiment to compare the core competencies of the search engines in the market. (') Each time you enter a query, each side of the screen is randomly selected from the search engines in the market. Their brands and special features are screened out.

Here are the search engine stories we have found interesting this week: Ballmer Critical Of Google's China Decision Ballmer suggested that Google's decision to no longer filter out internet searches objectionable to the Chinese government was an irrational business decision.

Google has at some point quietly increased its sitemaps limit from 1,000 to 50,000. In a discussion on a Google Webmasters forum thread back in April of last year, Google employee Jonathan Simon said that each sitemap index file can include 1,000 sitemaps. Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors,

Bruce Schneier in an article at CNN writes: In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access. (...) In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably,

Jeff Anderson in the forum writes, "I just set up a computer for my 7-yr old daughter, installed parent monitor etc. On to google, safe search is on, I was on it doing a search for 'how to find' - go try it now, just get as far as the 'f' in that phrase and see what it shows, and this is a 'safe search'!" For the partly NSFW list below, all containing the first top 3 results as shown on Google.com's auto-completion,