Thursday, June 8, 2006

Censored Searches on Google.cn

The following searches contain sites in the results top 10 Google agreed to censor for their Chinese search engine – traditionally, sites contained in the top 10 are deemed to be the most relevant of the millions available on each topic:

• democracy
• rights
• human
• human rights
• army
• mao zedong
• what google censors
• tiananmen
• bird flu
• bbc
• communism
• commie
• protests
• freedom
• jailed
• dissidents
• radio
• communist revolution
• hong kong
• politics
• uk
• repression
• chinese firewall
• water pollution
• yahoo
• education
• falun gong
• chinese filters
• tank man
• ...

And if you expand the test to check for words censored in the top 100 of most relevant result sites, you get words like the following:

• world
• people
• we
• china
• anything
• jail
• tank
• birds
• drinks
• ice cream
• burning books
• nazis
• fascism
• cops
• thieves
• politics
• crooks
• animals
• voting
• europe
• a
• m
• 1
• one
• what
• why
• sergey brin
• larry page
• objectivity
• ...

All above samples are supposed to illustrate the scope of censorship, not typical searches. And certainly most people don’t check the full top 100 for any search, and certainly I can’t really test the Chinese web (though if a user from China can add censored Chinese searches in the comments without risking their own security, it’s appreciated; I’ve been browsing random Chinese words and have seen the censorship disclaimer on several of those results).

To reproduce these results outside of China, set your browser language settings to Chinese and go to Google.cn. On some result pages, below the actual results you’ll see a disclaimer in Chinese italics. The disclaimer translates to “According to local laws and policies some search results are not showing.” To show 100 results instead of ten, append “&num=100” to the Google URL.

Censored Searches on Goog ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (36)

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