What censorship looks like

[SlipperySlope]

Notice what is returned for a search on "Tiananmen" from the United States, France, or Germany:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
http://images.google.fr/images?q=tiananmen
http://images.google.de/images?q=tiananmen

Now look at what is returned in China:
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

"Google and the Chinese government: working hand in hand to mold the truth."

[Poll_Blind]

1. Great post- thanks! n/t

PB

[mattclearing]

2. I guess there's no way to google bomb that, is there? n/t

[benburch]

3. Winston Smith's job just got easier. nt

[BushOut06]

4. I think you just stumbled upon something

Try looking up other things on Chinese Google. Like Falun Gong, Tibetan oppression, etc.

[Rosco T.]

5. Now try this version (slightly misspelled)...

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tienanmen

seems Google left a 'back door' on some things :)

[Cronus Protagonist]

6. The tanks pics are still there, just a few levels deeper

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen&svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&lr=&cr=countryCN&start=80&sa=N

Not that that's wonderful, but it's not censorship, more of a culturally sensitive deliberate bias. I'm sure there are more things that the square is used for than that one event, so the weighting seems to be understandable, and perhaps dare I say it, the bias is on our side of the issue - we see only the tanks and China sees it as a cultural center.

That got me thinking, though... What if you were in China and pulled up "New York City"?

http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&lr=&cr=countryCN&q=new+york+city&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2

Nice pics of New York City.

Yet here in the states we pull up the usual city views and some burning buildings as well....

http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&q=new+york+city&btnG=Search

I would have to conclude that the google results for western viewers is biased negatively towards China and shows more negative results overall - again, probably a cultural bias.

YMMV

[SlipperySlope]

10. Implementation

It appears that the implementation doesn't work by strictly excluding sites from a list, but instead filtering out sites that contain certain keywords (even if those keywords weren't in the search).

But I'm not really sure...

[Vinnie From Indy]

7. At least the Chinese aren't under the illusion that they are free.

Here in America we are rapidly approaching the same level of repression under the illusion that we are.

[Steve A Play]

8. Coming to a country near you soon!

Actually, if you pay close attention to what shows up in Google searches right here in the good old USofA, you'll soon realize that they're already doing it here on a much subtler level.

After all, they're just taking their que from our own Whitehouse web site. Take a look at the number of topics that are 'disallowed' to be indexed or cached by search engines by the 'robots.txt' file on the Whitehouse web site server.

If the Whitehouse is the 'people's house' isn't the Whitehouse web site ours as well? :shrug:

www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt :(

Steven P. :kick:

[SlipperySlope]

9. It is a little different...

With the whitehouse, you have the site owner (of whitehouse.gov) telling Google not to cache certain pages.

With the .cn domain, you have a government (China) influencing what results are returned.

I'm fine with a site owner telling Google what they want done with the contents of their site. I'm not fine with a government telling Google what to do with the contents of all site.

I see a distinction here.