Thursday, January 26, 2006

Overview of Sites Google Agreed to Censor in China

“Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google’s search technology, please visit ...”
– Google’s full help entry on “Principles - Does Google censor search results?” (January 26, 2006)

To make for more transparency in the ongoing censorship discussion, I’ve compiled a selection of result pages in which Google censors sites in China. To the left you can see the Google.cn, to the right the Google.com results. Search queries that miss results range from free tibet to communism. Sometimes, little is missing, and sometimes a lot (the keyword “Tibet” alone misses over 33 million results in Google.cn using the “all websites” selection). At one time, the result page didn’t include the notice that results were missing even when that was the case.

Note that the left-most radio button – “search all websites” – was selected whenever possible, but Google often forces a “search Cinese pages” selection.

Overview of Sites Google ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (35)

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