The American Internet giants have come under fire for doing business in China, where the Web is still censored and dissidents are often tossed in jail for what they say online. Should Google and Yahoo simply boycott China? Or should they work with the system and try to behave as responsibly as they can?

My guest Philip Pan, The Washington Post's former Beijing bureau chief and author of the new book Out of Mao's Shadow, says the companies' current approach -- careful engagement -- is the right one. Boycotting the world's largest market simply because you disagree with some of the government's policies is, for all intents and purposes, not an option.

For more of Pan's insights into China, see parts one, two, and three of our discussion.

Long before Cuil was the most talked about startup in the Valley, it was a side project that stay-at-home dad Tom Costello was tinkering with behind his wife's back. Why? She worked at Google and as he told friends at the time, "I can't do search my wife will kill me."

When he finally fessed up, she didn't kill him. In fact, she was intrigued by the math he'd come up with that allowed a small amount of servers to index billions of Web pages. But she knew there would be doubters and challenges ahead. In our final installment of our interview, Patterson tells me about the early days of the company and what it's like to start a company with her husband.

Check out our earlier discussions. The founders address: the launch controversy, why they stand behind their search engine, and where Cuil goes from here. Plus, a bonus tour!

Tom Costello doesn't care what the haters say, he's dead set on making Cuil into a Google challenger. (He claims the hyped-up-phrase "Google killer" never came from them.) Costello says it's a "travesty" that no one has taken Google on yet and is confident that Cuil will help make Google better.

No one? That may be news to Yahoo, Mahalo and the recently acquired Powerset. In the third clip of our interview with Cuil's founders, Costello and his co-founder Anna Patterson explain why those guys aren't true challengers to the search giant.

Coming up shortly, more from our interview, including:

We thought we'd give you a little behind-the-scenes extra of our visit to Cuil: Anna Patterson giving you the grand tour.

For those of you outside the Valley, it's the quintessential startup with few offices and tons of bikes. And come on -- everyone has a room for compost worms, right?

Coming up shortly, more from our interview, including:

When Cuil launched it mentioned five differentiators:

• Size: It has indexed more than 120 billion Web pages and claimed that was more than anyone else
• Privacy: It doesn't store your searches or activity
• Relevancy: Cuil ranks results based on the content on the page, not popularity of the site.
• Technology: On less than $33 million in venture capital Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages-something larger companies pay billions in servers and equipment to accomplish.
• User Interface: The site boasts a more magazine like aesthetic

It sounded great, but the one that didn't seem to deliver was relevancy. (A search of my name pulled up a picture of MC Hammer, for instance.) In the second piece of our interview with Cuil's founders we focus in on the product, and why Cuil designed it this way from the beginning.

Coming up shortly, more from our interview, including:

• The story of why Anna, the former Google search team leader, ultimately chose to take on her former employer
• Costello’s statement: "It's a real travesty that nobody has stepped up and competed with Google"
• Plus, check out our earlier discussion, as the founders address the launch controversy

 Stay tuned!

It was nearly three weeks ago that Cuil, a new search engine, launched. It was a 24 hours filled with thousands of articles and hundreds of TV spots-some of it effusive and some of it brutal. As CNET put it, "Cuil launched in a blaze of glory and went down in a ball of flames."

The controversy stemmed around Cuil's claims that the company had found a cheap way to index more of the Web than Google, or anyone else, and as such could have more relevant results. Hundreds of millions hoped it was true and flocked to the site. Most were disappointed by search results that were nothing like Google. Cuil founders Anna Patterson and Tom Costello admit they had to scramble to fix lots of problems that weren't clear until the site was live, but they add that different search results are precisely the idea.

We sat down with Costello and Patterson at the company's Menlo Park headquarters this week to let them respond to their critics and give us the story behind the controversy. Before you write Cuil off, listen to what they have to say.

Our guest Philip Pan, a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, is jumping from one frying pan into another: As Beijing bureau chief from 2000-2007, Pan witnessed China's "economic miracle" firsthand. Now, with his upcoming new assignment for the Post in Moscow, he'll be immersed in a culture far less inclined to foreign investment.

Pan, author of the new book Out of Mao’s Shadow, says China and Russia are more different than they are alike, despite the fact that both still cling to authoritarian rule that's likely to inhibit sustained economic growth over time. Nevertheless, in parts one and two of our discussion, Pan argues that free-market capitalism in these superpowers isn't about to wither away in the absence of democracy.

Also, check out part one and two of my discussion with Sacca on Net Neutrality.

A few months ago, many Internet companies hallucinated that online ad sales would be impervious to economic weakness. They haven't been. Still, online ads are doing vastly better than newspapers, TV, and other old media, and Todd Harrison of Minyanville.com believes that this digital success will quickly expand into videogames and other forms of embedded ads.

Meanwhile, the health of 800-pound-online-advertising gorilla Google is being debated again. Harrison thinks that in the long run it makes more sense for old and new media to team up rather than squabble. Setting aside the problems that would come with, say, Yahoo! buying Gannett, I do, too.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

NBC is trying, we'll give them that much. They've covering 2,200 hours of Olympic events live online (albeit not the stuff you want to watch). They're also covering 3,600 hours of Olympic events on TV (albeit mostly taped). In other words, they're producing more Olympics coverage than has ever been produced before. But they're still producing it for themselves and their legacy TV business, not you.

How would NBC cover the Olympics if they put you first and didn't have a legacy business to protect? They would:

• Make NBCOlympics.com a comprehensive schedule of each day's events, with a link to a live video feed of each. All events. 100% coverage. Searchable by day or by event with a simple toggle. For events that NBC itself is not covering, the link could go to a partner company's video. In exchange, NBC could give partners access to its own video. Note that NBC currently comes at its Olympics schedule from exactly the opposite direction -- by starting with the NBC networks and then describing what each will show on any given day and time. Hate to break it to NBC, but viewers couldn't care less which network they watch on. They just want to know how/where to watch the events they want to watch. So this thinking should be inverted. (Full schedule of coverage here)
• Note when the live feed is/was also available on TV and where/when. If it's on TV, most folks would prefer to watch it there, as long as it's not cluttered with ads and crappy commentary. If TV is still more profitable than online (it is), NBC should encourage web viewers to turn on their TVs. Or, better yet, watch both simultaneously.
  
• Make NBCOlympics a wikipedia-style start-page for games, athletes, news, blogs, stats, betting, etc. This instead of the me-too "Olympics" destination it is now.

As it is, we suspect we'll spend most of the Olympics cursing NBC for forcing us to watch the Olympics according to their schedule and style, not ours.

In response, we'll also try to take advantage of the first truly global medium to see if we can find other sources for the video we want to watch. If/when we find any, we'll let you know here. (And if you're two steps ahead of us, we'd be grateful for the heads up).