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Google.cn Still Remains In China

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-wait-a-minute dept.

hackingbear writes "Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country. And the company is still unwilling to confirm or deny if the alleged attacks were carried out by the Chinese government. 'I don't actually think the question of whether [the attacks were performed by] the Chinese government is that important,' Brin said. (That's the difference between state-sponsor vs. individual hacking. Why is that not important?) In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled as proved by this Chinese search query on June 4, despite the lack of any concrete actions by the Chinese government, which has so far made only useless general and standard statements on the matter."

7 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Right. by FooAtWFU · · Score: 2, Informative

    At Google, the businesspeople were kind of the ones making the complaints to begin with.

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  2. Mixed results by Arancaytar · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's true that the tank man does not rank number one on "tiananmen" as it does on google.com - but if I type tiananmen into the search box, the top suggestions are

    tiananmen square protest
    tiananmen square 1989
    tiananmen square tank
    tiananmen tank
    tiananmen square tank man
    tiananmen tank man

    And if I make the search more specific by adding "tank", I do get a few copies of the infamously censored image on page 1, even on Google.cn.

    Of course, I haven't digged this deeply before, so I don't know if the censorship was always this half-assed.

    1. Re:Mixed results by Arancaytar · · Score: 2, Informative

      PS: I can only use image search to check up on google.cn censorship, obviously, because I can't read Chinese.

    2. Re:Mixed results by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I wonder how you got that. I am accessing from Japan and I couldn't get any of those, whether searching in Mandarin or in English (using the search terms you used).

      At the end of the search there is the usual "some results are not shown to comply with the local rules and regulations" (in Mandarin).

      So I call shenanigan on the results you obtained.

      As a fan for Google, I am very disappointed.

  3. Re:That didn't take long. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    And here we thought Google had a strong backbone to stand up to china. Apparently not.

    You're surprised? Did you REALLY believe that "do no evil" bullshit from a company whose founders bought themselves a private jumbo jet?

    And Google is not just ANY company: they're a FUCKING AD AGENCY! They make their money by SELLING ADS. "Do no evil" from an AD AGENCY?!?!?!

  4. is chinese for 'tank man' .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=&btnG=Google+&aq=f&oq=

    get's you the images of the tank man.

  5. Re:Too expensive to not be evil by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 4, Informative

    good chance they would detain and otherwise mistreat Google employees if Google were to start openly claiming

    Foreign executives being arrested for political reasons? Sounds like they should be clamoring over each other on the roof to get a spot on the last chopper out of Beijing. Not a slow scaling-back of operations.