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.

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