Google Arabia announced earlier today the launch of local search portal for two new countries in Arabia, Iraq & Tunisia, throughGoogle.iq&Google.tn. The two portals were announced in a blogpostby Google Arabia today putting the number of localized search portals Google provides at 184, with 15 of them in Arab countries. As all of Google’s localized search portals, users should find results more locally relevant when using their country’s portal. Proving that point with an example users can try out for ‘Central Bank’....

A unified platform with the same OS across all devices. It’s been a defining feature of the iOS platform since day one and impressed it’s importance on the development community with the introduction of the iPad last year. At its I/O conference Tuesday, Google announced that Android 3.1 would also become a unified platform across all devices, bringing with it the improvements of the Honeycomb tablet OS and the advantages of a singular OS across the breadth of Android offerings....

Android Market is now accessible in China after the app store had been blocked and lagging for many phone owners in the country,as we reported earlier this week. Despite the speculation, the issues were not the result of censorship from the Chinese government according to the explanation put forward by Google. “We identified a technical issue during a software update and have now fixed it,” Google spokesman Taj Meadows wrote in an e-mailpublished on CNET....

Despite directing traffic for Chinese users to its Hong Kong search portal, Google has received a yearly extension to its Internet license in China, allowing the company to operate its services in the country,Bloomberg reports. Google’s move to direct searches offshore helps the company avoid China’s censorship rules, which bans pornography, gambling and content that criticises the countries ruling Communist Party, was put into place last year but the company still needs a license to operate other services in the country....

Updates at foot of post. Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Microsoft’s Bing search engine is copying Google search results, and it’s using the blogosphere, rather than its own blog, to get the word out. Rather than go all-out and announce its findings via an official blog post, Google initially reached out to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan to tell the tale and he’s written up alengthy explanation of the story, which we’ll summarise below....