AsiaPundit is enjoying the holiday today and was not going to blog. However, – pointed out by Rebecca — is really fun to play with. You can search Google.cn and Google.com at the same time. From it, AsiaPundit discovered that Google.cn does not censor search results for ""
Click on the image for larger size. The search in both portals turn up 395 sites. AP was not too surprised that Google.cn hasn’t set its filters for British slang but he was a bit shocked that Michael Turton’s site showed up as the second-highest ranked result. Blogspot is blocked in China, so according to Google’s statement that it will remove ‘dead’ links, Michael’s site should not exist.
Could Google be fallible? Or does the party approve of the View from Taiwan? Is Michael actually a pro-CCP stooge?
We report, you decide!
(Updated below, click on "continue reading" )
Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, , northeast asia
UPDATE: Michael was noticing that Google.cn was not omitting some obviously blocked sites, so I’ve run a few extra searches on Google and Google.cn without using the OpenNet Initiave platform. From Shanghai, a Google.com search now brings up 397 results for "Hu Jintao is a wanker," a Google.cn search brings up the same number. Running the same search through a proxy server (outside China), Google.com initailly showed 409 results and Google.cn showed 397. Given that 409 was an outlier, I ran a second test of Google.com through a proxy that showed 393 results. The blocked Michael Turton and Wikipeda sites remain the top results in all searches. Here are screen grabs: Google search, Google.cn search,
Google search with proxy,
Google.cn search with proxy, second Google search with proxy. The initial conclusions from this are that the ONI platform works and that the filters used by Google’s Chinese version are far from perfect.)
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Hey, having fun there, Chris
February 3rd, 2006 at 10:10 am
ROFLMAO. It’s true! I sold out for a lifetime supply of Szechuan mountain tea, one of those beauties of Hubei, and the keys to an overcapacity steel fabrication plant outside of Shanghai….
Why my site? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Thanks, Chris, I’ll be laughing about that one all day long.
Michael
February 3rd, 2006 at 10:18 am
Pundy, are you sure that site actually works? I put in “Hu Jintao Taiwan independence” and then “Taiwan independence” and got the same results in both .CN and .COM. Maybe the censoring only works in simplified Chinese.
Michael
February 3rd, 2006 at 10:47 am
And not only that, but one of the sites is WUFI and the other Taiwandocs.org. Neither of those should be accessible in China. SOmething’s not right here.
Michael
February 3rd, 2006 at 1:24 pm
I really wouldn’t be able to make any claims about the site. It was set up by the Open Net Initative, which is a pretty reputable source. But Google has admitted that there are still problems with its filtering. It was blocking some sites, such as those of major breweries, for no reason. So, it’s possible that they still haven’t filtered out everything that they were supposed to.
February 3rd, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Actually, the top result for the “Hu is a wanker” search was Wikipedia. That’s also blocked. So, yes, this is odd.
February 7th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
if you type in google.cn from Taiwan, you cannot access the site. what comes up automatically is google.com.tw, even though you type in google.cn
try it.
Google must answer for this!
February 7th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/technology/06link.html?pagewanted=all
good article about all this Nytimes reporter zeller