Google.cn Searches
Yeah, I’m not too happy about Google’s new Chinese site either. I found their explanation (better to censor than to not be there at all) to be weak… a surrender of the values that define the company.
A glaring difference between the .com and .cn versions can be seen on a Google image search for “tiananmen.” In the Chinese version, it’s a happy place. In the real world, not so much.
One thing I have noticed though is that people are going a bit overboard with their cries of censorship. I saw it posted that a search for “Jesus Christ” images only brought up 11 results on the google.cn search. Not true… it brings up 139,000 images. The 11 hits come from a google.cn search with results limited to servers in China. I took the liberty of translating the front page options so you don’t get fooled.
The easiest way might just be to hand-code the URIs yourself.
http://www.google.cn/search?q=searchhttp://images.google.cn/images?q=search
There’s plenty of censorship going on… no need to exaggerate the case.
You don’t get the censorship, as I understand it, if you access google.cn from the U.S. or, indeed, anywhere outside of China. Try again from an address within China and let us know what you get.
The “tiananmen” searches on Google images are vastly different, even from U.S. IPs. Maybe it’s even worse from a Chinese IP.
I’m testing this now.
After a couple of quick tests:
From a Chinese IP I was not able to access either http://www.google.cn or images.google.cn at all. However I was able to access http://www.google.com, which redirected to http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/ and searching from there, for instance, a search for tiananmen gave all sorts of results showing a less than happy incident there in 1989, including from Wikipedia, CNN, GWU’s National Security Archive, etc.
While there was evidence of differing results between the China IP and http://www.google.com accessed from the U.S., the results did indeed look like the same results as http://www.google.cn accessed from the U.S., but ranked differently.
I sent you a screenshot. Enjoy!
[...] And, Mark discussed the level of censorship in Google’s new Chinese site. Filed under: Blogs [...]
[...] a href=”http://txfx.net/2006/01/28/googlecn-searches/”>txfx.net: Google Cn Searches [...]
[...] http://txfx.net/2006/01/28/googlecn-searches/ Tags: censorship, chinese google, image search [...]