Google makes a little progress in China

In today's podcast: Google makes a little progress in China; Cebit visitor numbers drop 20 percent; and Microsoft contract worker drops protest.

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Google's share of Internet search in China moved up a hair last year, statistics from the government's number cruncher show, indicating the company continues to struggle against market leader Baidu. Google captured 16.6 percent of Chinese search engine users last year, up from 14.3 percent the year before, China's domain registry center said in a report dated Thursday. Google has struggled to raise its user share against Chinese search giant Baidu, which opened in 2000 and has worked hard to lead its domestic market. Baidu's user share rose more than two percentage points to 76.9 percent last year, the Chinese Internet Network Information Center said. China had 298 million Internet users at the end of 2008, the most in any country, according to CNNIC.

Europe's largest IT fair saw an almost 20 percent drop in visitors this year but those that did turn up to the six day event in Hanover were on average a higher quality of attendee than in the past, organizers said late Sunday. Cebit ran from Tuesday to Sunday and attracted more than 400,000 visitors, Deutsche Messe said in a statement. The show got off to a strong start in the local media spotlight thanks to the visit of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was there to prototype IT ventures from his state. California was the partner state of Cebit this year. But later in the week there were none of the big announcements typical of Cebit in the past. In part that's due to the lack of big-name electronics companies, many of which have decamped to the IFA trade show in Berlin, and cell phone makers, which announced their new products at the recent Mobile World Congress event, but it may also be a sign of the current economic times or product cycles.

A Microsoft contract worker who organized a protest against the company's plan to cut contractors' pay has abandoned that effort and accepted his pay cut. The decision was an emotional one, Paul Palios wrote on his blog. Palios organized a group of Microsoft contract workers to protest on the company's Redmond, Washington, campus. Palios wrote that he did not expect the amount of attention he would receive for staging the protest and did not anticipate the work it would require to keep it going. Palios said that after meeting with Volt Information Sciences, the global IT staffing agency that set him up with the Microsoft position, he decided to sign the contract amendment and accept the 10 percent pay cut rather than continue the protest against the cuts.

California's landmark data-breach notification law will get another update, if State Senator Joe Simitian gets his way. Simitian, co-author of California's original 2003 legislation, has proposed a new bill, SB 20, that would spell out what companies must tell customers in their data breach letters and require that breaches affecting more than 500 people be reported to the state's attorney general. Speaking at a security breach notification symposium Friday at the University of California, Berkeley, Simitian said that the new law would give greater clarity as to the content of security breach notices."

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.