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Tangible Impact of Censorship on Search Engines
An anonymous reader writes "NetworkWorld is reporting that Indiana University Informatics researchers have created a site that highlights the differences in query results provided by country-specific search engines. cenSEARCHip looks at engines like the versions of Google and Yahoo built to accommodate free-speech restrictions in China, Germany and France."
Does the thing highlight those also?
It could be done, but it probably wouldn't work. The nice thing about the search engine business is that it doesn't lend itself to monopolies. The moment Google stops being a reliable search engine, the moment it censors enough that it's no longer the best source of information around - that's the moment it vanishes. It costs us nothing to type in a different URL in our browsers. We abandoned Yahoo! quickly enough, didn't we?
We can probably trust the market to look after this one for us. The search engines have to return the results that best match the search criteria, regardless of political or editorial pressures, or the users will go elsewhere. The chief problem at present is that most of the search engines are American, and subject to the US government; if they really wanted to abuse that power, they could, and they could do it to them all simultaneously...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
odd that. I notice not two posts above mine that there is an almost identical post, but with results ONLY for China vs. the US. Perhaps we might wish to broaden our horizons a little bit and look at what OTHER data is available and what conclusions can be reached by that? China is China and Google, Yahoo and others are forced to operate with in the bounds of the laws of the land. So if the government of China says censor, the search engines MUST censor or loose access to a market of 2 billion people.
What we should be looking at is censorship where this kind of legal club isn't being held over the heads of companies. It is FAR more indicative of the general level of censorship in search engine results to look at search results from countries with a tradition of "free" speech. The results above are far more interesting. Here we have self censored results that aren't the result of governmental interference. It doesn't help us a bit to go and look for results we already know we will find. I.E. We expect censorship in China, so why are we so surprised when we find it? Here, however, are unexpected results.
Yahoo France came up with 29,000 more hits when searching for the term "Black Ops" than Yahoo US. Would anyone care to debate why this should be so? The same search on Google returns 7,000 MORE hits in the US. Why the massive discrepancy? The discrepancy is FAR greater when searching for more culturally sensitive topics. The first search I did found a discrepancy of 80,432 greater hits on the US Yahoo site then on the German Yahoo site.
I think we have FAR larger issues then censorship of China. Perhaps we should clean up our OWN backyards before going off and hunting garbage in someone else's
Mods, China isn't the only topic here, it CERTAINLY isn't the thrust of the article. Perhaps it would be of value to widen the discussion.
Sheesh!
Certainly it's uncomfortable to have to do. Think about it this way: nobody needs a right to free speech to say nice things. Nobody ever went to jail for saying 'Dear me, Fotherington-Thomas, isn't the sky such a lovely blue today?' A right to free speech is only worth having at all if you want to say something that somebody, somewhere, doesn't want you to say; and a right to free speech is only really needed if you want to say something that most people don't want you to say.
Rotten.com is our metaphorical canary. It'll be the first thing to die if we wander into a cloud of poison. Then we'll know we've gone wrong somewhere and had better back up.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I'd like to see a search comparison between the US and Canada (and other Western nations). I know in the past major stories on such topics as Cuba, Mad Cow and Marijuana were not even mentioned on US TV news or in major newspapers. It's amazing how much your news is controlled, and you probably don't even realize it.