The China File: Googling in China
Alright, so here is my expectation…
- I type in “Tiananmen Massacre” and “Democracy” into www.google.cn (The Chinese Google site)
- 30 seconds later, I do not hear the elite, stealth, black-clad secret police belay down the side of the building.
- I do hear them as they swing into the window shattering glass amidst heavy machine gun fire blasting my computer into a thousand pieces.
- I am dragged off to a prison and await my fate as an organ donor.
Ok so, that didn’t quite happen, at least not yet, but if you type in such terms on google.cn, only about 500 hits come back, whereas more than half a million come back on google.com. A similar thing happens on yahoo.cn versus yahoo.com. If I search in chinese characters the same thing happens, it looks like almost nothing of any real relevance is shown. The censorship is working, at least in the Chinese language… However, not everything is getting filtered out, especially in English. Just to see if a more formal analysis has been done on search filtering, Reporters Without Borders rated the major search engines based on how well they returned pro-government hits versus unauthorized sites. (Sadly, I cannot access the article’s website becuase I’m sure the site is blacklisted as an independent news organization.) So you guys, check out the article and comment to me what it says!!
Anyways, going to log off before secret police blast through the windows.
Comments(1)
