Faced with a soild Baidu in China, and helped by a timely attemted hack of Gmail accounts held by Chinese Human rights activists right from Google's servers, Google has chosen to play the "Do No Evil" mantra. From now on, Google has decided, it will not censor ssearch results on the Chinese version of its Search Engine, something which was long a blot on its 'goody good' image.
Google detected the Gmail hack attempt in December 2010. More information about the attempted exploit can be found on the Google Enterprise blog
Not only will it not censor search results, Google has even gone to say that it would quit China altogether, willing to leave the Chinese business to Baidu, which censors results, and thus winning the goodwill of the Chinese people all around.
In response to Google's threatened pullback, Baidu stock has gone up. If you remember Twitter Hackers took down Baidu this week
By choosing users over profits, Google has scored a goodwill point over Microsoft Bing, which recently was in the news for censoring results in India and China.
As far as the Chinese government is concerned, it will resort to the usual truthism that Google search displays porn results. Elswhere, like in India, Google has often censored pages not found okay by the political masters.
On the good side, image searches for "Tiananmen" are now showing up on Google.cn
