Slashdot Mirror
Poor Spelling Beats Google's China Filter
antifoidulus writes "CNN's money section contains a blurb(among other blurbs) about how poor spelling can beat Google's Chinese filter. The example given in the article is that a search for "Tiananmen" will yield peaceful pictures of the square, but a search for common mis-spellings such as "Tienanmen" will yield plenty of photos of tanks."
I are a gud spelr!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
that not everything can be filtered but this is a search using english alphabets. How good (read horrible) is the filter which searches using chinese langauge ?
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
This gives me an idea of how I can get past Bush and Co. monitoring my internet usage. I'll be able to say with a straight face that I never searched for Porn, but rather I was hoping to find information about shellfish
...as a Leader of the Revolution.
Kind of reminds me of when Napster installed that half-assed search filter. Midonna and Mitallica suddenly became quite popular.
People who want to get information will get it, and you can't stop them.
As we all know, Google has a patented page ranking system that calculates the correlation of words with websites. It does this (primarily) by reading links from all of its cached websites and parsing html links to determine what words are being used to describe the page in the link.
A while back, this was known as Google Bombing and certain individuals exploited Google's system very effectively by linking to pages with words that, by all rights, were not very accurate. After all, do a Google search for the word 'failure' and the top site is George W. Bush's Whitehouse domain Biography.
So what do you do to help the Chinese? Perhaps you could make a page with two columns. In one column would be the correct text with no link and the key word. In the other column would be all the permutated misspellings with links to the real sites. You could host this one your website and send it to friends asking them to also host it. They would need to slightly alter it and host it but it would effectively provide the page ranks for the misspellings and allow anyone in China (who has access to your page) a key if they need it.
My work here is dung.
This is a perfect example of why I've been saying all along that google is making the right decision in cooperating with the Chinese Government: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175251&cid =14571383
Now was this simply a failure of the filter method used, or did google deliberately create a weak filter to subvert the effort?
...search for common mis-spellings such as "Tienanmen" will yield plenty of photos of tanks.
So I did a Google search and all those pictures of tanks are basically one photo hosted on different sites.
Who would have thought a thechnique spammers use to beat filters would have real-world value.
Is Google's filter Baysian based?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
So.. Chinese people speaking the same broken Engrish on the Internet as they typically do elsewhere beats the Great Firewall of China.
Engrish in the spirit of Freedom!
--- We need more Ron Paul!
It would probably be better to *NOT* point these things out.
LSA is useful for dealing with synonyms, so I cannot see any reason why it wouldn't work with misspellings (assuming that they're common).
bang goes my karma... again...
...and so the weakness of computers is revealed: people and their presumption of perfection.
Sig? - yeah, whatever.
Thanks for your feedback. We will endeavour to respond to your bug report as soon as possible, and release an update if appropriate.
Sincerely,
Google information liberation management team
Google Inc. "Do no evil."
SHUT UP!
Do you want to ruin it?
Come on, damnit! Shutupabout it.
Consider this the "getting your foot kicked under the table" move.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
There's no apostrophe in grammar Nazis, at least not in the context you meant. Watch out for them though, they're everywhere.
They're filtering English mispellings, but what about French, Spanish, or German? A Chinese person could just search for what they're looking for under different languages. Granted, English is taught in China in their schools to everyone, but the folks who know other languages can start getting things and spreading it to the others.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They aren't necessarily out to defeat the determined. They can however, quickly and easily sanitize the popular perceptions by sweeping things under the rug. To the average citizen, they do a little search and never see anything particularly shocking. Mission accomplished. And as I said, given time, the determined will eventually get their message across. The Internet just adds another layer to a game that's been going on since the dawn of government.
Chinese web users can see full, uncensored results for their Google search by replacing "&meta=" with "&meta=cr%3DcountryBR" in the URL. Once the string is replaced, the censorship will not affect the results.
c hina&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=cr%3DcountryBR
This is what a chinese search for Democracy looks like after this method has been applied:
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=democracy+
Am I the only one thinking "why are we adveritising this so they modify their filters and improve them"? That's great that people are finding ways around the filters... but maybe keep that on the down low??
I'd rather see Google grand stand about not bowing to China's governmental pressure to assist in forceful suppression of ideas. Yes, that may get Google banned in China. However, Google is so big and powerful everywhere else in the world that news of its existence and popularity would become known to some curious folks in China who would begin to resent their government for banning it. In that resentment you'll find the seeds for a transforming change. That's a more self aware path to change than embracing the half truth of letting the Chinese people think: "Google? Oh yes. We have that too."
Look... as much grief as Google is getting for this, they know hackers are going to get past the wall. The Great Fire Wall of China will work about as well as the original did. It's there to make a point and it's not going to stop anyone.
God Hates Shrimp?