Slashdot Mirror
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."
I find their choice of countries amusing. Are these really the only countries that significantly censor the internet? (Or are these the only ones that google cooperates with?)
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Europe needs to recognize that free speech means free speech for everyone, especially the loathsome, or it's going to wind up with a problem soon. What exactly kind of message does it send that racial agitation against arabs is being championed and celebrated as a "we must do this to demonstrate we have freedom of speech" kind of thing-- at the same time that search engines are being censored, and people are being arrested for writing books? It says that being a fascist racist is okay in europe, unless you're the wrong kind of fascist racist.
Is that "European Court of Human Rights" thing just a total paper tiger, or what?
Just misspell what you're looking for...worked for the Chinese...
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
Does the thing highlight those also?
with no one around... does it exist?
I've always been amused by search result comparisons -- especially when they compare total results since most results beyond the first 1000 (as in the case of Google or Yahoo) are inaccessible.
What's the point, for instance, of Google saying there are 16,000,000 results for your query when they will only show you the first 700? I think this is even true of their API.
Incidentally, if for some reason you need to quickly find the last known google result, there's always http://www.lastgoogle.com/.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Ultimately it comes down to your level of trust in whatever system is doing the filtering. What most people don't get is there's almost always some "non-partial" element to messages. News media can't report on messages that the government deems as critical to national security. And now we are finding the same thing with google. And people are suprised?
China 69,600 US 3,450,000
children cries falun gong tears unheard unseen
I'd have thought that China wouls be encouraging webpages talking about Falun Gong in such glowing terms. Bizarre.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
China! I got 309,000,000 hits for democracy there, and only 307,000,000 in the US. The only possible explanation is that China is more free than the USA.
I did a few sample searches on CENSEARCHIP, here were some of the larger discrepancies and interesting results I found:
----Compare Google results between China and United States:
Censor Chinese Internet
China: About 810,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique) United States: About 7,140,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique)
Censor Chinese
China: About 1,790,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique) United States: About 11,700,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique)
Human Rights
China: About 879,000,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique) United States: About 878,000,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique)
Jack Daniel's
China: About 1,800,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique) United States: About 68,700,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique)
xxx
China: About 108,000,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique) United States: About 107,000,000 results (Fetching first 10 unique)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The reason China was singled out is because of their heavy censoring of politically undesireable facts. France and Germany are listed because of anti-Nazi speech laws. Both countries have successfully sued Google to force them to take down such content.
Now, try using this search on Google and scroll to the bottom: scientology site:xenu.net
Woo-hoo! Land of the free!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A search on Tiananmen Square, for example, results in many text references and images of the Chinese government crackdown on protesters in 1989 on the U.S. search site, but mainly hotel and tourist information on the Chinese version
Case in point. People in China are more likely to want to visit Tiananmen, and therefore would likely click on more links for hotels and tourist attractions. People in the U.s. are less likely to be interested in travelling there, and more likely to look up the history associated with it.I looked up "Wyoming" in both Chinese and U.S. googles (not using this site, but actually using google with the Chinese translation of Wyoming). The Chinese site brought up a Wiki entry, a site showing history and demographics, and another page showing its famous landmarks... stuff that people in China might be more interested in. The U.S. site brought up the official Wyoming state government website, the official local travel website, and the University of Wyoming website... stuff that people in the U.S. would be more interested in.
Looking further down, the chinese site brings up more about history and international travel, while the U.S. site brings up more about hunting, skiing, local state departments, etc.
I also looked up Tiananmen Square in an image search, and yes, the first couple pages do indeed show nothing of protests. But its not like its completely blocked, the tanks show up a few pages down.
One thing I noticed in doing my own comparisons is that Censearchip is only showing you the first unique differnces. On some simple searches, those differences don't even show up for a couple pages... the results are more or less the same.
Now before everyone goes jumping down my back... I'm not arguing that there's no censorship, because I know its a proven point that there is. And I do think that this site is indeed indicative of that. I just think that there is a possibility that some of these measures aren't completely accurate and that there are other factors involved.
--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
China: About 61,400,000 results United States: About 61,200,000 results
As governments struggle to literally get a grip on the world web, the world web citizenry is building a new hierarchy of cultural cross development.
We can individually and collectively point fingers at one another, but the greater fact is that we have in place a mechcanism that allows us to do so.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I dunno the difference is pretty clear to me. First link: tanks and troops fighting with civilians. Second link: nice buildings and a happy looking tourist couple. But searching in chinese would probably reveal even more of a difference.
Bungo!
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.
good pont. how about sending a message? i'll put it out there to start with my esteemed ex-employer dogpile. young enough to listen, smart enough to do something.
He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.
If it's the same one that's been going all around the net as an example of Oh Noes Google r t3h 3vil!!!!1!!!111!! then that's not Google censorship; apparently the person who uploaded it set those restrictions, and Google just honoured them.
After all, some material might be public domain in one country and copyright in another; or it might contain footage from the BBC Creative Archive and thereby be restricted to UK only. Plenty of legitimate reasons why the person uploading something might wish to restrict its distribution.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you search for the "Dalai Lama" on google china, you pretty much get redirected to a page saying what a criminal the Dalai Lama is. http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6984
Though you probably already knew that. Doesn't seem to work from a western IP though.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
I did a search on falun gong, first on images, which was interestnig. Then just "web search." Result:
...
China:
action affected bureau chief china chinese civil cult denouncing education engineer evil experts falun gong gong's hijacking leading movie news ni professor programs radio related report said satellite sept signals special television transmission tv xinhua xinhuanet
United States:
1999 according april article articles body ccp china chinese communist considered crackdown cultivation dafa dharma edit fa falun free gong government health high hongzhi human incident law li million mind new party people persecution police practice practitioners public published qigong religious reports seen state states times torture united wikipedia years
WTF?
Actually, the Chinese govt strongly disapproves of Falun Gong, and has been cracking down very hard on it for some time. You can read more about this if you search Google for "chinese government falun gong" or "china falun gong" etc., as long as you're using Google from outside of China.
The Chinese govt also maintains an official anti-Falun Gong website, though it's unreachable from here at the moment. They also have some articles putting their side of the story here.
I'm not too keen on Falun Gong personally, but at least they're not chucking anyone in prison for disagreeing with them.
A search for the keywords: linux install Chinese yielded relevant results. American yielded viagra.
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!
The site returns nonsensical results now. (Maybe as a consequence of the Slashdot effect?)
But the number of sites returned for China and the U.S. for the phrase "tiananmen square massacre" is dramatically different.
If you actually do that search on MAIN Google as opposed to images, you can actually find sites that mention the atrocity, ie. they haven't attempted to delete the controversy from history. However, they usually portray the protests in a negative light; still, this doesnt prevent Chen Yong (China's Joe Smith) from forming his own opinion, and the facts may be missing in a few places. Don't forget that Tiennamen Square isn't JUST the site of the controversy as it is here in the west; it's a normal, everyday place for most people. So your 'case study' is somewhat flawed, but it does get your point across.
Did it occur to the guys behind censearchip that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Chinese web content is written in Chinese? With that in mind, I wonder how meaningful it is to compare search results of English keywords such as democracy or Tiananmen. Try these:
Try googling on "George Bush nutcase" with Windows XP and the 'no filtering' option set and you'll probably get about 198,000 hits. Now try on another platform and you could get as many as 203,000 hits.
Aparently, the political censorship taking place for Google users in China results in making porn easier to find.
Comparing China and US with the search phrase "teen girls" results in the following unique word lists...
For China...
animal aqua beastiality bestiality blowjobs breeds brunette cheerleader cheerleaders com cum cute dog farm force fucked fucking galleries hardcore horse hunter masturbating mature milf milfhunter milfs models petite porn posing pussy rape schoolgirl seeker series shaved showing spreading stripping sweet thong thongs thumbs tiffany topless used year zoophilia
For the US...
adolescent advice april assault boy child color culture daughter daughters dave death disorders doesn't don't dr eating education exercise frank healthy image important information iraq john lindorff look march media messages mothers parents paul pope relationship relationships response right seventeen shop st support things war website weight woman women's
-- The Hoss Man
try searching for a term (any term) between the US and US versions (or any other country and itself), not only are the number of results radically different in some cases, but the tag clouds are also often totally different.
How are we supposed to "explore the differences in the results returned by different countries' versions of the major search engines" (TFA) if the results returned by identical countries' versions of the major search engines are not the same?
seems from this that the results returned by this site are somewhat arbitrary, and certainly useless for it's purported purpose...
weird.
Sorry but blame google. They took down the links after just a scary letter from a lawyer. No government agency forced them to.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Try this: set the engine to Yahoo, the first country to France, and the search term to "hitler". The biggest fonted word under France is "bush" ... and "nazi" isn't even on the list.
Food for thought or just curious?
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
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.
Here are some interesting results from the searches below. Search: Iran Germany: About 394,000,000 results United States: About 393,000,000 results Search: Iran France: About 395,000,000 results United States: About 393,000,000 results Search: Iraq France: About 753,000,000 results United States: About 342,000,000 results Search: Iraq Germany: About 754,000,000 results United States: About 342,000,000 results
Just for grins, I entered "anal sex" at the CENSEARCHIP site and hit "Image Search."
Results:
China: About 855 results
United States: About 683,000 results
The images retrieved and displayed were, to say the least, markedly different.
One would think a country with mandatory birth control would want its citizens to know all about about non-reproductive sex techniques, and encourage them.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Purged? I think not.
"There where LOTS of links to that "blocked" site that was critical of Scientology.
And there's lots of links to sites blocked by China."
Visable in CHINA??? I think not.
"Unlike the examples of France, Germany, and China. Nothing in US law would prevent that site from saying that they believe that Scientology is a cult and is dangerous.
Until the Scientologists write a skeptics handbook, copyright it, and then claim sites are copying from it. What better way to use the system?"
Okay you do know that is just nuts don't you?
"and France and Germany do not allow anyone post pro Nazi information.
Or anti-Nazi information, if it quotes too much from Mein Kampf. They don't want conspiracists to sneak publication of a banned book."
A Banned book? A book banned just because of the ideas in it? Not a TV show, movie or magazine but a book? Do you know how hard it is in the US to get a book banned? I can go and buy the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, the little Red Book, or any number of books that criticize the current government of the US. How can you even comment on what is censorship when you seem to accept the concept that an idea is too dangerous to be allowed to be published doesn't fill you with dread? Yes the US needs to reform copyright law. It is way too restrictive and the US needs to codify fair use into law. But banning a book? I had no idea that there was any place in Europe so totalitarian that a book of political ideas was illegal? THAT is scary to me. Who should decide what is safe to think? I can understand restricting photographs but text? Words? Ideas? Don't you understand that restricting ideas that you happen to dislike is just as dangerous and restricting the ideas you do agree with?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.