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Tangible Impact of Censorship on Search Engines

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hands-on-fun dept.

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."

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. What about free speech restrictions in the US? by luvirini · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does the thing highlight those also?

    1. Re:What about free speech restrictions in the US? by lysergic.acid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If that's so then why are Walmart, and Nike, and pretty much all U.S. clothing manufacturers allowed to run sweatshops in other countries that would violate labor laws here in the U.S.?

  2. Re:Internet searches a public good? by meringuoid · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In any case, it's hard to imagine an alternative to commerical services like Google and Yahoo. I doubt there'd be much enthusiasm to a taxpayer-funded, publicly accountable search engine.

    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.
  3. Re:There's always the US. by meringuoid · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I feel that they shouldn't be censored, but I always feel a sort of queasy moral indefensibility about that stance when defending the truly repugnant speech.

    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.
  4. Compare the United States and ... by Easy2RememberNick · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.