Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Google's New Service: Censorship



I was testing Google.cn, Google's new portal with servers in China. Searches, such after "the communist party" or, perhaps not so surprising, "faluñ goñg", will turn up a little message at the bottom of the page:
据当地法律法规和政策,部分搜索结果未予显示。
In accordance with local laws and policy a part of the search result is omitted
Censorship in practice. In China though, just letting people know that the information is being censored is a kind of progress. "Don't do evil", sort of.

Update:
Unfortunately searching 芙蓉姐姐 does NOT turn up any disclaimer. I mean, WHERE is the censorship when you really need it!! She seems to have gotten pretty desperate recently. Maybe it is because of the competition for internet fame. For those of you who don't know this very famous blog (atleast last spring it was...), go check it out! Keep the Sister Hibiscus hype alive!

Update2:
That link ('desperate') to pictures of the half naked hibiscus is not working anymore... Maybe the censorship actually do work.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

As one would expect! But it seems their work is not completely done. If you search with pinyin (ex. falun dafa), the banned websites are still shown, even those in Chinese, although the note is also there at the bottom of the page.

Anonymous said...

There is a way to look at forbidden pages. You can use CustomizeGoogle and Google Cache together. This only works in China.

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/10/31/1414203.shtml

Johan said...

Yeah... Unfortunately blogspot.com is most of the time blocked too, so telling me doesn't really help anyone either. Don't think Slashdot has been blocked though.

Actually, I haven't actually met anyone complaining about not being able to look at censored pages in China. People have learned to stay away from these topics anyway and are basically not that interested. If you go to a random internet cafe, university dorm etc. everybody is playing games, chatting on QQ, or occasionally checking out some news, stars, music etc

Don't think the censorship makes sucha big difference. Those who want to are able to access everything by using proxies.