This is one of those things that’s smart both operationally and from a PR perspective:
The company has decided to store search records from the site outside of the country in order to prevent China’s government from being able to access the data without Google’s consent, said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, speaking Monday at a panel discussion at Santa Clara University. “We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hand over these kinds of records to the government,” he said.