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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Sample List of Censored Domains in Google.cn

To see what kind of domains Google China censors based on gov’t request, I queried Google.cn with over 20,000 domains using the “site” operator (e.g., site:epochtimes.com). Whenever Google’s self-censorship disclaimer appeared on the page, I added the domain to the list. Sometimes, all pages are missing – e.g. roughly 15 million pages of EpochTimes.com – and other times, only specific sub-domains are censored. (And sometimes, I couldn’t figure out at all what was missing, like with phmagic99.tripod.com.)

Some of the sites listed are free web hosting services (like Geocities or Angelfire), others are international news sites or human rights sites. With these it’s kind of obvious why the Chinese gov’t treats them as opponents. For other sites however, like those of music bands, I didn’t see any obvious connection. Potentially NSFW.

(Note that this list is not even remotely complete. Also, it does not reveal a ratio of censored vs uncensored domains, as I added some domains I knew manually, and merged several country specific domains into one – and the over 20,000 sample domains are only semi-random as they were all picked from the Open Directory Project.)

[Thanks to Seth Finkelstein.]

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