4/12/2006 12:51:53 PM, by Nate Anderson

Google has a new name—at least in China. At a Beijing ceremony, the company announced that it would be known in China as "Gu Ge," or "harvest song." What does "harvest song" have to do with search results? The new name is intended to give "the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way." Obviously. Google's English name, if transliterated into Chinese, means "old hound," so it doesn't take a marketing genius to see why the company felt it needed a new identity.

At the event, Google CEO Eric Schmidt also defended his company's decision to censor search results in China, arguing once again that Google needs to obey local laws and that it is better for Western companies to engage with China than to remain aloof.

"From our perspective, we must comply with the local law, and indeed, we have all made commitments to the government that we will absolutely follow Chinese law," he said. "We don't have an alternative and the Chinese law does prohibit certain information. We made the decision to go ahead and implement those prohibitions because we have to implement local law and it is in that spirit that we have entered the China market in order to serve the end-users."

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