About www.google.hu

Update: Google Inc. acquires google.hu

No, http://www.google.hu does not belong to Google Inc., neither to its Hungarian subsidiary, Google Számítástechnikai Szolgáltató Kft.
Google Inc. was not quick enough (or simply didn't care) to claim this domain name way back in 2000 when the .hu ccTLD liberalisation took place. Since then this name had been owned by many. It landed at Hírek Média és Internet Technológia Kft. in 2003. This company used this address to provide web search service based on Google search results until this May, when they deployed their own proprietary engine which provides surpisingly good results. So this address nowadays redirects to http://kurzor.hu, which is a quite usable Hungarian web search engine. Many surfers don't even realize that they are using an other service than Google's, although the user interface of kurzor.hu does not resemble the famous design made in Mountain View, CA. (Using the .co.hu TLD is not as usual as in th UK or in Yugoslavia for instance.) If you check out the Hungarian pages Google has indexed, you will see 122 000 mentions of google.hu which is a huge number if you consider that the "real" URL - http://google.co.hu - is mentioned on 655 000 web pages altogether. Nevertheless this domain has not been banned, it appears as the second page right after google.co.hu, if you seek for "google" restricting the search to Hungarian pages. (which is considered highly competitive under the .hu domain too)