14 DAY TRIAL // Or maybe not. But this seems to be the latest Google motto after the company announced that it plans to open a new data center in Belgium, a country that often brought Google quite a lot of trouble. If you didn't know yet, Google lost an important lawsuit against some Belgian newspapers, the publications suing the search giant for copyright infringement. However, the new data center will be built near Mons and will employ almost 120 engineers, as MarketWatch reported. According to the report, the Mountain View-based company will invest 250 million euros ($341 million) for the new office that was already confirmed by the Belgian authorities.
"Google will invest EUR250 million in a new data center in a depressed area of Belgium, Le Soir reports, citing unnamed Belgian government officials and Google official Peter Fleischer. The new data center in the former coal mining area near Mons will employ 120 people, the paper says. It will be located near a canal, in order to use the water to cool off the Google computers," the same source reported.
As I said, Google had several problems with the country's newspapers after it was sued for copyright infringement. It all started when the search giant's product, Google News, published several headlines provided by the publications but it seems there was no official authorization. The Belgian newspapers filed a complaint against the company, the judge ordering Google to remove all the information from their website. However, Google News continued to exist even without the Belgian newspapers but it now tries to conquer the local market with a new data center.
Google News is often attacked by the company's rivals because the product is based on an often-criticized procedure: it gathers news and headlines from more than 4500 sources, but it displays only the headline, while the rest of the text is linked to the original author.