In the wake of stories earlier this week reporting on Google caving in to Chinese government censorship policies, some folks have been checking out the effects of that censorship:
It’s easy enough to check. Google’s Chinese page for image searches is http://images.google.cn. We’ve been running searches from there and the surprising thing is that you don’t always get the same search results each time you run it. It’s almost as though your own machine’s cache of previous searches is influencing the results you get on subsequent searches. Or maybe Google is still tweaking the filters, so some things slip through sometimes but not at other times. Whatever is happening behind the scenes, it’s beyond argument that Google users in China are not getting the same search results as Google users in the US and elsewhere.
The difference in search results can be striking. On a clean search, Google-China turned up 10 hits on an image search for jesus christ. Just like that, no quotes. By comparison, the US version of Google image search turns up 168,000 hits on the same exact search terms. 168,000 versus 10. And this is just an image search. We’re not searching for the teachings of Jesus, just pictures. China’s version of Google significantly filters the search
“Nice” to see that Google’s helping ensure the loyalty of Beijing’s people to the State.