Google has joined Yahoo and Microsoft by launching a government-censored version of its search engine, defending the move as a trade-off granting the Chinese greater access to other information. What is annoying is it comes a week after Google gave the finger to the US department of Justice when asked to disclose data on what people were searching for in Google.
Google, whose motto is “Don’t do evil” has now joined Microsoft and Yahoo in an act of hypocrisy by compromising its values for investors' benefit.
Searches with many words like falung gong, Dalai Lama, Taiwan independence, Tiananmen, show different results from Google.com and Google.cn. The China site in most cases shows only government sites or pro-China sites. Here is an example of the differences between the two sites using an image search on Tiananmen Square:
If you've got some spare time, you can try googling different words in .cn and .com and make new discoveries on the Great Firewall of China.
The one difference Google will have over other big search engines is that Google will inform users when access is restricted on certain search criteria.
The big question is this: Can Google ‘work with’ the Chinese government to gradually increase freedom of information through negotiations, and will Google do a Yahoo act by passing over information to the government, or will it protect the privacy of its users in China and prefer to close shop than to spy on behalf of the Chinese authorities on journalists and activists? (It is a big question, eh!) What do you think?
Cross-posted at www.vijaysappani.com
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Hacking Google China:
Spread it/Digg it/before they break it
2 - Matt Largo
That replacing the URL string is good info, but the fact that they have to "hack" around the filtered results is primary issue. Since Google basically downloads a copy of the Internet to its servers then indexes and presents search results from the copy, it's only a matter of time before URL string replacement hacks don't work. Who knows? Google may already be suppressing search results in the U.S. and other countries besides China. How hard would it be to filter out undesirable results for searches performed on political candidates? Supreme Court Cases?
I think that search engine result suppression services may be a viable business in near future. Such a firm wouldn't necesarily need access to filter results, they would just need to be able to "cloud" or bury the undesirable search results with non-offensive results, effectively pushing the expected result to appear with a rank of 1,000,0000th on the list so that it will be ignored.
It all boils down to money. If Google has to compromise their service to tap the Chinese market to make a shitload of money and they can still look themselves in the mirror, more power to them. If they think the integrity of their service is more important, they shouldn't be doing business in a Communist country. Obviously they chose the former.
I'm no attorney but, I don't think there are any laws that entitle people to full, uncensored search engine results anyway? Are there?
3 - James Smith
Arguably, the links regarding Tiananmen Square show how narrow minded some of us are about China. So, everyone in the English speaking world thinks about the politically sensitive events of June 4, 1989 while others in China have chose to move on.
Is is really about censorship? Do you think Chinese people are so naive as to think some of this stuff never happened? Of course they do, most people you talk to in China know about Tiananmen, Taiwan, Tibet and Falun Gong, etc...
Moreover, Google's decision was business motivated. If a company chooses not to follow the laws of a country they give the market up to companies (Yahoo, Microsoft, Baidu) that do.
4 - Bliffle
Seems to me the answer is to separate the Search Layer from the Presentation Layer. That way some software providers would create spiders to aggregate data from the net, and then other providers would create presentations that could contain whatever filtering, censoring and prioritizing algorithms they see fit to accomplish their commercial or government needs.