In a surprise announcement that ended speculations about the future of Google's operations in China, the Internet search giant said on Friday that its Internet-services license, to continue delivering search results in the country, has been renewed.

According to analyst Sandeep Aggarwal, of the San Francisco-based Caris & Co, while China has renewed the license through 2012, the officials will still review the decision every year - thereby implying that the license can still be yanked by China's government if it feels that Google is not abiding by it satisfactorily.

Since the license had expired, Google had stopped the automatic redirecting of the Chinese users to its associate site in Hong Kong - a country that operates under a system of limited autonomy and does not practice censorship.

Though the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is yet to confirm the news about the renewal of Google's license, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said: "We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license, and we look forward to continuing to provide Web search and local products to our users in China."

The renewal of the license will give Google the opportunity not only to retrieve its search market share lost to China's Baidu search engine, but also to appease the advertisers affected by Google's half-year-long clash with the Chinese authorities, over the mandatory filtering of Web content.