Meanwhile, Google ups ante in China

MUMBAI, India: Even as Goolge announced the closure of its development center in Russia, media reports said that the search engine major was upping its ante in China.

Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer, Google, said earlier this year that the company is looking forward to serving Chinese netizens again.

According to media reports, Google is preparing a return to the world’s biggest Internet market, and has started to put back its services in China.

One report in People’s Daily said that although Google still directs online search requests from China to its Hong Kong site, the company’s map products are once again available in the market.

The browser version of Google Maps and its Google Earth software were partially accessible in Beijing from Wednesday.

Gao Chunhui, who established China’s first personal website in 1997, said on his Weibo account that Google had moved some of its servers to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The Internet service provider Google was using belonged to state-owned carrier China Telecom Corp, based on the Internet protocol addresses of the servers, the media reports said.

Other Google-owned products such as Gmail, news and application downloading platform are still inaccessible, as per the media reports.

It must be noted that Google terminated its services from China in 2010 due to disagreements with the Chinese regulator.