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Carrefour Censorship on Google.cn Continues  (View post)

Kobie [PersonRank 0]

Friday, May 2, 2008
16 years ago5,065 views

Thank you for the article and for including Bird Flu.

   There may be many topics that are fully or patialy censored, but bird flu affects the world.

Regards,
Kobie

userinch1na [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

If you try searching the same words "家乐福" on http://www.baidu.com one of the most popular search engines in Ch1na, you get the message, "this search doesn't meet the relevant laws, regulations, and policies; unable to display [search]". So it probably is the govt issuing commands to these search engines.

Justin [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

"家乐福" on baidu.com returns three results (the first result is Carrefour China website).

At the end, it gives "据本地法律法规和政策,部分搜索结果未予显示" (According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results did not show) appears.

The Chinese government may be issuing a high-priority demand on all media to ban Carrefour (on an unrelated note, this is just ridiculous and childish).

Orz86 [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

new,you can searching the words"家乐福"on Google.cn.

Vince [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Pretty disgusting from google.
If google cannot allow the full use of its search engine, it should just close google.cn
When you think about it, these days, not many things/people are more powerful than China ...but google is and could therefore use that power to stand by their values.

When Larry Page was a young guy, he would have not hesitated. Now he is in control of the most powerful corporation, he hesitates.... That's so shameful, I think!

Thanks for the article anyway!

Mark M [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

how do larru and sergey sleep at night? is money really so compelling? sigh...

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Cause pass the 5.1 and already controled, Carrefour back now. You can search carrefour at Google.cn, Baidu.com, Yahoo.com, Sogou.com. Yesterday, all four main search engine in China have carrefour censorship.

Aguyinchina [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Strange...I just serached all relevant terms and others related to Carrefour in English and Chinese from within China and encountered no problems whatsoever.

Many of the returned searches included details about the recent uproar and news items about the events from western media sources. I had no difficulty in viewing those sites returned in the results either. One of the first returned results pages included a story that Google and Baidu were blocking search results related to Carrefour.

If I can get in the twenty millions of items on just searching for Carrefour China in English, why do you all have so much trouble?

I think you are being monitored by someone as an individual rather than there being a grand Google and Chinese Government conspiracy.

Not to make you paranoid or anything, but are you sure that it isn't just you that the Chinese government is watching?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I updated the post as the censorship of this word has now been lifted, thanks guys.

j perkin [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

I can't help but speculate:

Is the day coming when when a term was purposely excluded from all of Google world searches, would be a subject that would be unknown, uninvestigatable, and thereby completely "cloaked" to the world?

(Yes, yes ... I KNOW they do no evil. But maybe the someone hijacked the jet and ...)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

J Perkin, some content is likely already removed world wide by Google – like a post in a Usenet group containing holocaust denial. It was apparently illegal in Germany but Google removed it for other countries as well, and since one of those other countries includes the US it's likely to be missing everywhere else too. (If you include things like illegal pornography, even more stuff is completely missing, though you may then have the position that it is fairly missing.)
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001027.html

(Also note that Google does not always disclose exactly what it is they censor.)

Andy Wong [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Block at will, block at will.

While people around the world can search at will,
PRC government can block at will.

Seth Finkelstein [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Great stuff.

Note "Incidentally, not only was [bird flu] partly censored in 2006 and still is partly censored in Google today ..."

I think this is just reflecting the domain blacklist. The obvious missing result is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2005/bird_flu/default.stm

Which is omitted due to news.bbc.co.uk being blacklisted.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Yes. I might have written "the results for [bird flu] were partly censored" to make it more clear that it was not a direct keyword censorship but a censorship due to the domain blacklist. (Though we will never know which domains may in fact be censored mainly because the gov't figured they contain certain sensitive keywords.) The end result is similar though: certain good, relevant news sources – by Google's own estimates (as it's their ranking) – will be missing on certain subjects, like bird flu.

As for direct censorship, I only spotted it for Chinese politicians in Google images China before – i.e. zero results – but the censorship was then removed. The query 邓小平 is now showing 125,000, but was showing 0 for some time before:
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&q=%E9%82%93%E5%B0%8F%E5%B9%B3&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2%E5%9B%BE%E7%89%87&gbv=2&aq=f
Baidu at the same time was showing 10,000s images, so Google was censoring more than Baidu.

Google once told me, "Our basic strategy is to go no further than the filtering performed by Chinese Internet service providers, meaning we attempt to remove only results that would cause an ISP to block access to Google.com." I wonder if indeed ISPs censored everything containing the Chinese word for Carrefour for the period Google censored it completely?

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